By Adam Fleischmann

The site is easy to access. Just a short walk and I’m there, immediately confronted with two large rectangular windows. The large window up high and on the right is mostly opaque, save one dominating feature: a single, dark line scorches across its surface like a comet’s tail, bottom left to top right. The window on the left is less subdued, less ominous. Graceful curving layers of color arc to the right and skyward, almost topographical in their technicolor. Later, the layers will change shape, sloping hills, climbing ever-upwards or back down, until 2100.

I click on the “Graphs” menu above the two windows, switching the window on the left to a graph of “CO2 Emissions and Removals” rather than “Global Sources of Primary Energy.” I move the “Carbon Price” lever on the Energy Supply table and the lines on both windows plunge dramatically.

This field site, of course, is a website, and I’m visiting it from the desk in my bedroom that has served as my home office for over a year, due to the public health measures surrounding the novel coronavirus pandemic and thanks, in no small part, to my own privilege allowing me to work from home. The website is the online space of non-profit Climate Interactive’s climate change solutions simulator, En-ROADS. This simple climate model is free, runs on a laptop in less than a second and is available in nine languages. It is a climate policy System Dynamics (an approach to systems science) model that can show “how changes in the energy, economic, and public policy systems could affect greenhouse gas emissions and climate outcomes” (Climate Interactive). Just a click away from the Climate Interactive (CI) homepage, En-ROADS is the model to match the Climate Action Simulation role-playing game.

Last Thursday, April 15, 2021, I joined 316 other people on Zoom in a giant game of the Climate Action Simulation. Before it started, I went to refresh my memory on the En-ROADS model, whose refaced and expanded version was released about eighteen months ago along with the game, a non-role playing workshop and a guided assignment for the classroom and elsewhere. Last year CI converted the Climate Action Simulation, which is usually played in-person, for online play during the pandemic and beyond. Originally set up to play with twenty to fifty people (same as the in-person version), last Thursday’s giant game was an experiment to see just how scalable it could be.

Following my own experiences with remote, online and event-based research—some of which I’ve previously written about here on anthro{dendum}—this giant online climate change game has inspired me to ask questions related to anthropology and the shared circumstances of the global pandemic. For remote research methods, can a website act as a placeholder? Can a website be part of a field site? More broadly, for many, including many academics and educators, the past year has been spent Very Online It’s a year that has forced us all to think about our individual actions in relation to our communities and a larger virally interconnected globe. It’s also been a year that’s further demonstrated the inequities of our political, economic and medical systems. Could the experiences of the pandemic provide gateways into another possible world, ways of seeing and being in the world that emphasize our relations, in spite of the distances between us? Climate Interactive’s in-person games allow people the opportunity rethink their relationships with larger systems through learning experiences that are embodied, social and affective. I was curious how these learning experiences could function online in ways that give insight into building a better world post-pandemic.

The scalability experiment opens by unmuting everyone and having them say “hi” in their language. Among the 317 participants, I count people and languages from North America, Europe, South Asia, South America, Central America, East Asia, Africa and Pacific Islands. CI co-director Drew Jones briefly introduces the model, its confidence-building methods and the work of CI to “apply systems thinking as a framework for addressing climate and climate-related justice and equity issues.” He then breaks down how we’ll play the game. Players assigned alphabetically to one of the teams of stakeholder groups will negotiate their team’s positions among four to six fellow players in Zoom breakout rooms. Each stakeholder team is represented in the main Zoom room by a Team Leader, played by a CI staff member or associate. For Climate Justice Hawks, it’s Swedish activist Greta Thunberg; for Conventional Energy, former Exxon Mobil CEO and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. Land, Forestry and Agriculture is represented by someone playing Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro and World Governments, Prime Minister of Bangladesh, Sheikh Hasina. Mary Barra, CEO of General Motors leads Industry and Commerce, while Clean Tech is led by Elon Musk of Tesla Motors and SpaceX fame. After breakout room negotiations, each team will be polled on which policy lever in the En-ROADS model their Leader should move, and each Team Leader will advocate for their team’s chosen climate policy change back in the main Zoom room. Drew will then share his screen and show us all in En-ROADS what difference that policy change makes. Together, all teams will work toward the goal of reducing global temperature increase to below 2°C, and ideally below 1.5°C—just like the goals of the actual UN Paris Agreement on climate change.

I’m assigned to the Conventional Energy team. I’ll have to negotiate for the continued relevance of the fossil fuel industry. We’re given five minutes to read our role-play briefings, change our Zoom names and backgrounds to align with our teams. Drew returns, now sporting a jacket and tie as UN Secretary General, Antonio Guterres, and sends us to our breakout rooms with gusto. By chance, all but two players in my room are from Conventional Energy, including Team Leader Rex Tillerson, played by CI staffer Bindu Bhandari, based in Nepal, who is wearing a necklace of money symbols from different world currencies. Myself, Yvonne in Switzerland and Paula in the U.S. round out the Conventional Energy team. Rory from Ireland represents World Governments and John plays team Land, Agriculture and Forestry from Hong Kong. Much as Rory tries to be the voice of reason, John quietly backing him up, we from Conventional Energy dominate the debate, arguing for carbon capture and storage technologies—a solution that allows us to keep producing our existing products even though those technologies do not yet exist. A pop-up appears telling us we’ve got 30 seconds before Zoom sends us back to the main room.

Up first in the main room is Clean Tech, who vote to increase the carbon price. Elona Musk, a woman in a sharp red blazer with an eastern European accent, steps up to the Zoom mic, riles up her Clean Tech teammates, and rallies the rest of the stakeholder groups for carbon pricing. “Electrify everything! Make them pay! Let’s put a carbon price on everything, we can do it by ourselves!” Before Drew-as-Guterres shows us how a carbon price of $50/ton CO2 would lower global temperature increase, he asks all the players “run your mental model,” to mentally simulate what we think our actions will do to the global temperature. The CI team then releases another poll, asking us, “What are the equity considerations that concern you with this policy? Or equity-related co-benefits you’d hope to capture?”

A $50 carbon price in the model leaves +3.2°C temperature rise, a relatively small reduction from business-as-usual 3.6°C.  The Conventional Energy and Industry and Commerce teams thwart a higher carbon price. Bolsonaro pledges some afforestation (planting trees), but it doesn’t do much to reduce emissions since carbon-absorbing trees take so long to grow. Team World Governments proposes some mild investment in renewables, but that, too, only reduces the global temperature by 0.1°C, since Clean Tech’s carbon price already drastically reduced coal use. During the whole first round of negotiations and proposals, the Zoom chat feature is figuratively on fire, the debate raging among what feels like all three-hundred-plus participants. Drew spurs us on with urgency, “This is terrible! We’re only at 3.4°, we started at 3.6°!”

In our second-round breakout room, Paula from my Conventional Energy team breaks the ice. “Out of character, this role-play is amazing. I want all my meetings to feel like this!” Rory, representing World Governments, agrees: “Three things: first,” he addresses our Rex Tillerson, “you in character are amazing. Two, how are you going to pay for carbon capture and storage? Third, you mentioned your engineering expertise and expressed concern for developing nations, Rex. Allow them to piggyback on your clean energy technology! You could be leaders!” Yvonne from Switzerland provides a counter argument for our dominant Conventional Energy team, but suggests conceding to a $50/ton carbon tax. Then I interject to reclaim the power dynamics. “I feel like I need to simply say: ‘Fossil fuels keep the lights on.’” I fidget, smirk. When Tillerson nods and repeats my phrasing, the rest of the breakout group all smile at the repetition of a phrase we all hear but suspect Bindu and I don’t actually believe out of character.

Brought back after the second breakout room, we have twelve minutes left. Drew-as- Guterres asks Team Leaders for just one sentence on the one policy their team will advocate for. Eventually we do get the temperature down to 1.8°C, using a combination of carbon pricing, electrifying the transport sector, regulating methane and other greenhouse gases and even carbon dioxide removal technologies (which, Drew reminds us, don’t exist yet, despite their appearance in countries’ real-life Paris Agreement pledges).

Drew stops the game there, and acknowledges what we’ve just accomplished. The team shares a link to our simulation, where our results can be viewed. He tells us we’re going to shift into a mode of reflection, removes his tie and suit jacket and asks everyone to remove background images saying what team they’re on. He asks us how we’re feeling, how it feels to go through this, to play a different role. A word cloud is produced on the polling website based on our answers: “hopeful,” “frustrated,” “overwhelmed” and “complex” loom largest. “I want to acknowledge the legitimacy of whatever you’re feeling,” he says. We’re then asked to take a 60-second moment of silence to reflect on what we would love about being part of a world on track to making something like our scenario happen. During the silence, I can hear only Drew’s quiet breathing, my roommate speaking in the room next door, my own thoughts. Other players have closed eyes, or are staring up in contemplation, hands on chins, ponderous. This time, instead of a word cloud, the screen lights up with dozens of responses. “Justice” and “future” are two words I note repeat. The simulation debrief ends with a question about what we’re going to do next to help fight climate change.

Ideally, this climate-policy simulation is meant to teach people some of the dynamic complexity of the climate-policy system, relating their own lives to broader systems and equity issues, while teaching them to connect delayed and distant climate causes and effects that are not intuitive. If the giant online game of the Climate Action Simulation is any indication, this form of climate change education and communication can work even with increasing levels of abstraction. Perhaps this unsurprising, given the success of the large Zoom call setting that is not unfamiliar to many students and educators during the past year or more of much teaching and learning from home. However, the longevity of online Zoom-style games for climate action work like CI’s remains unknown; there have clearly been advantages and challenges to hybrid and online learning during the pandemic. As for websites as field sites, many ethnographers contend that remote fieldwork works best when combined with some element of in-person research, and it’s true that my own has involved both. Some learning moments can be gateways to the possibility of making the world anew, independent of the learning or research venue.

In a recent talk organized by Trent University’s Anne Pasek, UCL anthropologist Hannah Knox talked about “the magic of scalar shifting” available when understanding global climate change action through a technological lens. Knox also noted how for the bureaucrats, engineers and scientists with which she did fieldwork, climate change was close to home—not far away, distant and global. Knowing climate change entailed a rethinking of people’s relationships with themselves and larger systems. I’ve experienced this gateway opening among my students, and also as a student, in anthropology and other classes that taught me to see the world anew. I’ve also experienced this new possibility through the lens of photography as an early teen. For many people, Climate Interactive’s games and models make global climate change about “immediate, material relations to the world and knowledge about the future,” as Knox put it in her talk. Through engaging learning experiences (“I want all my meetings to feel like this!”), CI’s work like the giant online Climate Action Simulation allows people to form those immediate relations between their lives, the global climate and future ways of being in the world. As Drew put it in his closing remarks, “We’re going to need to find the arguments, voices, ways of being that bring others together to get to the solutions we need.” I’m hoping that the strangeness and distance of the past year can, counterintuitively, help us do that.

Adam Fleischmann is a PhD candidate at McGill University in Montréal, Québec, located on unceded Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabe territories. His research looks at the community of non-state climate change actors at the intersection of science, politics and technology.

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…

Hi there!

I am reaching out to whoever it is that receives these emails or runs Anthrodendum to ask for a possible favour. I was wondering whether or not you would find it worthwhile to write about doing ethnography from home – and by that, I do not mean ‘studying a place you call home’, but literally from our desks.

I, like the 9 other young women in the anthropology honours class at my university, find ourselves at a complete loss for how to restructure our already underway research projects in the face of the Coronavirus pandemic. Having been issued a national lockdown for at least a few weeks, we’ve been told to shift our research to an entirely online form. It is unlikely that it will be safe to continue to conduct traditional participant observation even by mid-fall in the urban-centers of our country’s Coronavirus outbreak. While we have been given literature to pour over regarding ‘virtual ethnographies’ and doing anthropology online, I, and my fellow students, would definitely benefit from some pretty basic pointers.

I appreciate your time in advance!

Kind Regards,

Stephanie Cookson
University of Pretoria, South Africa
Bachelor of Social Science Honours

Dick Powis

This is a great question, particularly as you are definitely not alone right now. Nearly every anthropologist I know – student or otherwise – is in the same boat. And like you (and many of them), I have no experience in digital/virtual ethnography, so I’ll try to talk about how my research experience might translate into a digital/virtual world.

The first thing I would determine is the research site. In this context, that could be an actual website, or it might be a bigger community of people that operate across multiple websites, or perhaps it’s a community that occupies a small part of a website. What is it about the site or community that interests you or demands attention? Then, I would approach it the same way I approach my own ethnographic research: move in, live there, get to know people, lurk, make it a part of your daily activities, learn the language (or jargon). Become a community member, get involved, become a fixture. Journal about it!And then from there, you can reach out and interview individuals. See how they feel about the topic of conversation or ask them why they talk about things the way they do or hold certain attitudes.

Anyway, that’s a basic framework of my approach. I know you probably have plenty of literature to read, but I’d like to push Collins and Durington’s “Networked Anthropology” to the top of your stack if you’re not familiar with it. Thanks, good luck, and I think we’d all like to hear from you in a few months and see how everything turned out!

Maia Green

How can social scientists do research when the social assumes unprecedented forms? 

Dispersed communities of concern are emerging in response to the pandemic and using online collaboration platforms designed to allow groups of people to interact and see each other in real time. Established communities of practice — in business, the media, religion and  academia — are making massive efforts to carry out their ordinary activities online. These kinds of communities are probably quite different to the kinds of virtual communities anthropologists have studied, for example Tom Boellstorff’s engaging ethnography of how people make and manage virtual selves in the online environment of  Second Life. New virtual communities brought into being as a response to the pandemic are different. First because of scale and reach, and second in pace of expansion. Established communities which are moving online are different from wholly online communities because the practices they perform are distributed through the internet, but were developed independently of it. 

The differences between these kinds of online communities could suggest different strategies for fieldwork. As you are asking about projects you have already started researching, one option is to do what other established communities are doing and move your practice online. This would entail locating the online spaces where your chosen community now spends its time and exploring with them the  possibilities for some kind of participation (subject of course to having obtained relevant ethical permissions and requesting consent). You could then carry out your fieldwork through the usual steps- networking with key informants and organising interviews through Skype or other apps.  

A second strategy could be to focus on an already existing online community, either one which is engaged in the area you are researching or, perhaps, consider a new topic. Social media are great places to find members of different social worlds and begin to explore them. Once you have made some contacts, you can explore with them the possibilities for more structured interaction, again subject to consent and ethical review.  

Option three is to do something totally new in an emergent social field and explore some of the ways in which the pandemic is creating new forms of behaviour and sociality. You can do  this based on what you learn about how people are responding to the pandemic online, through news, social media and what you hear from friends and colleagues. If you are permitted to leave your home to get essential foods or take exercise you could observe people’s interactions. If staying inside you can reflect on your own changing practices. How are you structuring your days? How do you make boundaries between work and leisure? How are you socialising remotely with others outside the home?  

Responses to coronavirus in all countries raise important questions around inequality, health systems, care, and social solidarity. All aspects of life are affected by it in some way. Research conducted during this uncertain  time can shed light on the multiple creative ways that people in various situations respond to the ongoing changes brought about by the pandemic. 

Ryan Anderson

Most of my research focuses on traditional ethnographic sites: places and communities and the issues they need to deal with. I look at the politics of conservation and tourism development in Baja California Sur, Mexico, and conflicts/challenges of sea level rise adaptation along the California coast. Some of this work has led to an increasing interest in the intersections between these places/communities and media/online communities. I’m really interested in how ideas about places, as expressed through media (and online forums), shape those places. This piece on media depictions (link) is a step in that direction, and the next step is to examine the online component of this media. To give another example, some of my work on sea level rise, has led me to the whole issue of climate change denial/skepticism… which in turn has led to an interest in how mis- and disinformation spreads online. In both cases I am not just interested in studying the online component, but rather how it fits within larger processes and systems.

That’s one basic approach to doing digital or virtual ethnography that I have found helpful: keep it holistic and examine how something fits within a broader social picture. In your case, you may only be able to look at the online component for now, but even so you can develop some ideas and ask questions about where and how certain things may intersect with offline social behavior. Take notes, gather ideas… and study those offline intersections when it’s possible to do so. In all ethnographic work you have to do your best given the situation you are in.

A second tip is to look for ‘places’ where people come together, where they congregate. Think creatively about what this can look like. For example, in my work it’s useful to look at how people think about and talk about places in the comments sections on travel sites. Keep in mind though that there are ethical issues that you want to think through for anything you’re looking at online. But these kinds of spaces can provide fascinating insight into how people think about and interact with ideas, places, and events.

So overall, keep things holistic, look for connections, and find places where people come together. Be as creative as you can, and don’t forget to attend to ethical issues. Good luck!

Matt Thompson

I am not an academic anthropologist, I work for a city public library, but my professional practice is informed by my training in anthropology and ethnography. At the library our doors are closed to the public, but we are still at work urgently seeking ways to bring our services to the community. A lot of that, by necessity, will be online via mobile devices.

Recently, I attended a webinar hosted by StoryCorps, best known for their short, engaging, personal recordings of everyday people; stories of love and families and obstacles overcome, real make ’em laugh, make ’em cry kinda stuff (link). The webinar was to be about their digital oral history project. I was interested because my library has an already existing, albeit unloved, digital oral history project that’s just sitting there not doing anything. I think, maybe StoryCorps can give me some new ideas or inspire me to revive this moribund project? By the conclusion of the webinar, StoryCorps had not solved all my problems. There was no switch I could flick to make our oral history project vibrant and successful. But they have a very interesting model that you might be able to adapt to ethnography under quarantine.

Program participants download a StoryCorps app to their phones, allow permission to the mic, and create an account. Family members are then encouraged to interview each other using the app to record, there are plenty of tips on their website for recording a successful interview. The recorded interview can stay as a local file on the participant’s phone or it can be uploaded to the StoryCorps archive. Note: these are .wav files and can be quite large, especially if the interview is long. There is a code you can give participants that shares their recording on a community page, which can then be curated and enriched with text and photos.

Not a system without constraints, but take the brand name off of everything and we might find some ideas that could be put to work. A lot of people have phones, many of which can function as digital audio and video recorders. You cannot be in their physical space, but that space is shared with select others. They can interview, record, and photograph their family members and roommates. Essentially, participants use their phones to create digital ethnographic objects and then they share them with you. This has potential as an alternative to virtual or remote ethnography, particularly if pursed with diligence and compassion.

To make this model successful would require testing some thorny technical and ethical considerations, but they are not insurmountable. I would begin by partnering with a community organization and experimenting with the model inside just that group, focus on organizational history for example. Then once the researchers better understood the limits of the data collection method, no doubt incorporating feedback, steps could be taken to address the issues and the project could expand. But I think the basic idea of getting study participants to use their phones to collaborate with the researcher has a lot of potential.

Caio Coelho

Dealing with anthropological fieldwork is always something difficult to teach, it is an apprenticeship that heavily relies in the experience of the ethnographer and the group researched. The basics for fieldwork, in my view, is an exchange of affections, of information, of intelligence, of cultures. But it isn’t exactly implied anywhere that it has to be done physically.

We live in a society where speech became detached from the body when the telephone was invented, some 150 years ago. We live in a society where images can appear to move themselves for some 120 years now. We live in a society where it is possible to see wars, while they are happening from some other corner of the world for the past 60 years. And more recently, we can use computers to practically do anything: from virtually walking the streets of New Delhi on Google Maps, participating in academic events held on Twitter (Hi #ASEH2020tweets, it was great!), to communicate with someone in almost anyplace in the world via videochat through a device that is smaller than a hand. I’m not saying that technology is democratic in this 21st Century, there are problem of access to them, as there are problems of access with almost anything under Capitalist regimes. But I’m saying that there are possibilities.

One of the main dimensions of fieldwork, according to Jeanne Favret-Saada (1990), is to be able to affect and be affected by others [see Favret-Saada, Jeanne. 1990. “Être Affecté”. In: Gradhiva: Revue d’Histoire et d’Archives de l’Anthropologie, 8. pp. 3-9]. She vividly describes dewitchment in her fieldwork in the Western French Bocage, in which she only was able to enter the “native” network of conversations around magic when they started to see her as a person who had been bewitched. The question that I pose to you Stephanie and colleagues is: can we only be affected through the body? Through the corporeal experience? Or is affection a phenomenon that relates more to our minds? If it is so, our mind is able to visit places, through our imagination and technology, to get us in touch with others. Including myself in this example, I make part of Anthro{dendum} and am in touch with the conversations we do here, even though I never met anyone of the collective in person (I’m from Brazil). I can participate and observe, as the digital nature of what we do on the blog helps to trespass the geographical contingencies of where we live. I’m not saying every fieldwork is possible to be done at distance, but I’m saying that there are possibilities. I would like to take a moment to let you see another example of this in action, there is a street photographer that has agoraphobia. Her project confronts her own fears, and she found a way to explore the world using one technology to access what she had difficulty to access physically. Hope this helps.

Matt Thompson

Matt Thompson is Community Services Librarian for the public library in Suffolk, Virginia. He has a doctorate in anthropology from the University of North Carolina and has been blogging with Anthrodendum née Savage Minds since 2010.

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Digital Migration

By Patricia G. Lange

Migration patterns have long drawn the attention of anthropologists. Contemporary humans and their ancestors have been running across the globe for millennia. As it happens, humans run all over the internet too. In the context of mediated environments, to migrate away from a site means that participants stop using it and instead move on to explore and interact on new internet vistas. The digital migration story as seen through the lens of socially-motivated YouTubers reveals a dynamic kaleidoscope of patterns that shed light on human mediation. A multi-year ethnography of vloggers revealed nuanced and consistent digital migration tendencies. Key questions of interest include: 1) When do people deploy multiple forms of media and “swap them” in and out for social reasons? 2) Under what circumstances do participants more permanently leave one site and go to another, or several others? and 3) How might anthropologists build a collective conversation about digital migration patterns?

The dazzling array of media that is available to many people around the world produces what Madianou and Miller (2012) refer to as a “polymedia” environment. According to this concept, when people have access to media such that price, availability, and digital skills are not factors in deciding uptake of a technology or influencing consistent usage, people “socialize” media. In other words, aspects of dealing with relationships and sociality more centrally influence how and why a particular medium is selected. People choose from a “plurality of media which supplement each other and can help overcome the shortcomings of a particular medium” (Madianou and Miller 2012: 8). Madianou and Miller studied people who were not economically privileged. Yet, they had access to a “plethora” of media, and their decisions about which medium to use revealed much about their relationships and sociality. For example, people might choose email over a phone call to avoid unpleasant confrontation in a particular relationship. Participants use social and emotional criteria to select particular media from an array of choices that are equally available and plausible for them to use. 

Media choice is at times influenced by personal factors that index issues of control. Research on young people on YouTube suggested that participants tended to display “media dispositions” in that they strongly preferred certain media and avoided others (Lange 2014). For example, in a study of “digital youth,” one study participant said she would never post of a video of herself on YouTube. She said, “I don’t really like the idea of anyone in the world being able to watch me do something.” Despite being able to participate on YouTube infrastructurally and economically, her media disposition clearly showed that recording YouTube videos of herself was not desirable. Her reasoning suggests that what appears to be a personal choice was also influenced by aspects of sociality. She preferred to control her image vis-à-vis larger populations by withholding it. Ultimately, she preferred to engage with YouTuber as a viewer.

Interview narratives from a study of adult users of YouTube who used the site socially in its early years, also reveal instances of how participants took advantage of alternative types of media to “overcome the shortcomings” of YouTube. My ethnographic film, Hey Watch This! Sharing the Self Through Media (2020) was filmed at grass roots meet-ups across the United States (and one in Canada) in which observations of participants’ interactions as well as ethnographic interviews revealed important information about YouTube sociality through video. 

In the film, interviewees describe how they used the live video chat service of Stickam to deepen their social connections and simply have fun with other YouTubers. Stickam (2005 – 2013) was a live video chat service that enabled participants to see and communicate with other people simultaneously through video feeds. It offered a limited number of “boxes” or windows containing the live feed of several participants, as well as an option for text chat. In one meet-up in Toronto depicted in the film, a live Stickam chat session was displayed on a very large screen, thus enabling in-person participants to enjoy interacting with remote YouTubers who could not attend the gathering.

Interviewees in my ethnographic study noted that they enjoyed participating on Stickam because it felt more “live” or present than YouTube’s asynchronous atmosphere. Interviewees also noted that responses times were far more rapid on Stickam than on YouTube, in terms of receiving feedback on videos. Instead of waiting for two or three weeks for feedback on a posted video, YouTubers could get responses immediately and interactively through video chat. Burgess and Green (2018 [2009]: 101) made a similar observation and characterized Stickam as a “supplement” or “plug in” to YouTube, thus illustrating the “polymedia” aspect of YouTube and Stickam.

Unlike other documentaries that are character driven, Hey Watch this! is constructed in a modular way around themes of YouTubers’ experiences when using an array of media. Two themes that clearly emerged from the interview narratives were reflections on where participants saw the “real me” located across different types of media, and their views on the status of their YouTube participation over time. Some YouTubers felt that they could be more their “real selves” on Stickam as opposed to YouTube, which felt less live and was more public. Interviewees expressed concern about having their videos exposed to hostile audiences and “haters,” or people who post mean-spirited or pointless comments or insults. Initially, their use of Stickam represented a pattern more consistent with being in a polymedia environment. Later on, however, their concerns about YouTube and its monetization trajectory prompted them to greatly reduce their participation on the site. They began migrating to other social media such as Twitter.

Hey Watch This! documents the results of a multi-year ethnography. Although it is not always feasible, long-term ethnographic projects offer certain advantages. Sociologist Henri Lefebvre (2004) draws on a rubric he termed “rhythm analysis” to analyze cycles or patterns of behavior, a lens which is productively applied in studying internet migratory patterns. A long-term engagement enables the ethnographer to see large-scale patterns or cycles of interaction that are not necessarily visible when studying a group over a few short months. For example, when I began filming the documentary, YouTubers were very excited about using the site in social ways, to bond with other people in shared “communities of interest” such as those who wished to learn about video, or who shared similar difficult life experiences. By the end of the filming, interviewees expressed dismay over YouTube’s highly commercialized environment and told me they were no longer participating on the site with the same intensity. A long-term engagement helps document the kinds of cycles or patterns that Lefebvre saw as important for understanding the inner workings of society. In this the case the cycle began with initial excitement for the site, proceeded to exhibit a high point of feelings of community with other YouTubers, and then saw a decline a few years later as interest in the site cooled and people moved on to other social media.

A glance at some of their YouTube channels confirmed their self-observations about their dwindling participation on the site. Nuances about digital migration emerged from their narratives. Whereas some participants engaged in “radical migration” in which they made a complete break with YouTube, others engaged in a more “conceptual migration” in which they cooled or stopped using YouTube for the most part, but they brought the “concept” or idea of YouTube sociality to a new site, in this case Twitter (Lange 2019). Mechanisms that support a conceptual migration to Twitter from YouTube included retaining their YouTube channel name on the new site, interacting with other YouTube participants on Twitter, providing links on YouTube to their Twitter channel, and continuing to talk about YouTube and other shared video-related themes of interest on their new social media site.

In a conceptual migration, participation on a particular site such as YouTube may not be completely severed but finds its way onto a new site. One interviewee insisted that his lack of activity on YouTube and his move to Twitter was not a “migration.” He continued to see Twitter as something to use “in addition to” YouTube. Yet, he removed many of his YouTube videos and no longer posts there. Nevertheless, his view clarifies and supports the analysis that YouTube as an idea retains purchase on a new site conceptually. The idea of YouTube never quite goes away even though from a participatory standpoint, a migration has occurred because YouTube is no longer used with consistent intensity.

Characterizing these patterns and discovering additional nuances will be important for future studies in digital ethnography. YouTubers also spoke of what I refer to as “in-migration” in which people do not leave a site, but rather start a new account within the same site that they feel better reflects their current interests and media persona (Lange 2019). On YouTube, this means opening a new channel and posting new types of videos. Another conceptualization is the idea of “virtual diaspora,” in which a site closes and its participants “flee to other virtual worlds” (Boellstorff 2008: 197). Participants may be very upset and long for a new platform in which to interact. Boellstorff (2008: 197-198) refers to this configuration as a “virtual diaspora.” He also notes that “lesser forms” of virtual diaspora appear when a site simply becomes less popular and participants leave for another site, again illustrating the notion of digital migration.

Use of the word “diaspora” in this context may initially be somewhat controversial for some scholars. To anthropologists, diaspora connote groups of people who are violently or at least suddenly separated from their homeland to which they may never return. Notably, it is certainly possible that groups who are suddenly ejected from their online home world might feel a profound sense of loss and confusion. Clearly strong feelings may accompany the loss of online sites, which may represent a very important social life line for dispersed individuals, especially marginalized people who rely on internet sites to find crucial social support. Loss of an online, anchoring site might well prompt people to experience intense social mourning. Whether such patterns constitute “diaspora” in the emotional sense must be studied in each case. An umbrella term such as digital migration is arguably useful for encompassing many different forms of migration and emotional responses that appear. 

Moving forward, it is important that anthropologists continue a collective conversation about online migration patterns and come to terms with nuances that are revealed. A long-term approach is beneficial in this context given that it may take several years for migratory patterns to be fully revealed. In my observation, intensive participation for some of the YouTubers lasted a few years before they migrated away. Saying good-bye to one site may index a permanent break with most social media, or it may mean saying hello to a new site. Studying such patterns is of value to anthropologists who wish to understand the cultural, social, technical, economic, and other factors that influence how people to choose to share the self through media. My anthropological antennae are receiving strong signals that digital migration will be a fascinating terrain of study for years to come.

References

Boellstorff, Tom. 2008. Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Burgess, Jean, and Joshua Green. 2009. YouTube: Online Video and Participatory Culture. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. 

Constine, Josh. 2013. “Scene Kids Cry as Streaming Site Stickam Shuts Down.” TechCrunch. January 31. http://techcrunch.com/2013/01/31/scene-kids-cry-as-streaming-site-stickam -shuts-down/. 

Lange, Patricia G. 2019. Thanks for Watching: An Anthropological Study of Video Sharing on YouTube. Louisville, CO: University Press of Colorado. https://upcolorado.com/university-press-of-colorado/item/3737-thanks-for-watching

Lange, Patricia G. 2020. Hey Watch This! Sharing the Self Through Media. 54 minutes. https://vimeo.com/394007182

Madianou, Mirca, and Daniel Miller. 2012. Migration and New Media: Transnational Families and Polymedia. Abingdon, UK: Routledge.


Lefebvre, Henri. 2004. Rhythmanalysis. London: Continuum.

“Stickam.” n.d. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stickam.


Guest Contributor

This account is used to upload posts by guest contributors to the blog. For more information about contributing to anthro{dendum} please see our contact page.

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Pretty much everything we are going to do could be done in a plain text file. The key difference is that these apps allow you to add tags to individual paragraphs, while most text editors which support tagging only allow you to tag individual documents.¹ There isn’t really much more to it than that, but as you will see, it can be a powerful tool for doing research.

Let’s make a short sample conversation:

Q: What are your favorite fruits?
A: Apples, oranges, and pears.
Q: What do you like about those fruits in particular?
A: I associate apples with my home, where we had an apple orchard. Oranges… because we used to eat them on holidays. And pears – actually, I didn’t used to like pears, but for a while I lived in France and I got a taste for them there.
Q: I see, it sounds like apples have particularly strong associations for you?
A: That’s true. I always associate the smell with my childhood.
Q: But not oranges?
A: No, not as much.

Now let’s tag the text. We could add tags after the text, but instead we are going to try, as much as possible, to add the tags right in the text itself, as that will make it easier to highlight what we are looking for. (Note that in two cases the keyword is in the question, but not the response, so I’ve added the tag after the text.)

Q: What are your favorite fruits?
A: #Apples, #oranges, and #pears.
Q: What do you like about those fruits in particular?
A: I associate #apples with my home, where we had an apple orchard. #Oranges… because we used to eat them on holidays. And #pears – actually, I didn’t used to like pears, but for a while I lived in France and I got a taste for them there.
Q: I see, it sounds like #apples have particularly strong associations for you?
A: That’s true. I always associate the smell with my childhood. #apples
Q: But not #oranges?
A: No, not as much. #oranges

Now, we just copy and paste this into Dynalist.² (Below is a picture, but you can visit the actual outline here.)

Dynalist highlights the tags automatically. Clicking on any one will filter the text for that word. Even better, we can combine tags, searching for either both #apples AND #oranges, or either #apples OR #oranges (pictured below):

And if we want, we can expand the search to look for the same tag across all our documents. You can also export the search results to a new document containing just the selected text. And for those who like the mind map features of some professional QDA apps, Dynalist and other outliners can also export an OPML file which is readable by almost any Mind Mapping app.

List of posts in this series

• Free Your Mind, the Text Will Follow (Working With Text 1)
• RegEx 101 (Working With Text 2)
• Text-laundering (Working With Text 3)
• Lazy PowerPoint (Working With Text 4)
• Roll Your Own QDA (Working With Text 5)

Kerim

P. Kerim Friedman is a professor in the Department of Ethnic Relations and Cultures at National Dong Hwa University in Taiwan. His research explores language revitalization efforts among indigenous Taiwanese, looking at the relationship between language ideology, indigeneity, and political economy. An ethnographic filmmaker, he co-produced the Jean Rouch award-winning documentary, ‘Please Don’t Beat Me, Sir!’ about a street theater troupe from one of India’s Denotified and Nomadic Tribes (DNTs).

kerim.oxus.net/

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Three Lies of Digital Ethnography
by Gabriele de Seta

We ethnographers cannot help but lie, but in lying, we reveal truths that escape those who are not so bold. (Fine, 1993, p. 290)

Let’s start with a conclusion: Ethnographers lie.

This might not be a widely shared proposition, but I experience it often in my own work, especially when talking in practical terms about my fieldwork. The more the weeks of traveling between Chinese cities, staying at friends’ houses and transcribing their social media interactions recede back into the past, the more I doubt about the scholarly value of the ethnographic study of digital folklore I say I have conducted. I realize that an assemblage of disciplinary imperatives, epistemological nudges and promises of legitimation I have internalized during my scholarly formation keeps determining how I carefully massage the description of my research project according to the needs of the moment.

As I distort my fieldwork experience into elevator pitches and small talk during conference breaks, I realize that I am enacting the gentle calisthenics of professionalism and persuasion. Like a well-trained marketer, I avoid discussing the challenging aspects of my research or my actual methodological practices, and instead piece together strings of buzzwords and abstracted data points intended to prove my disciplinary belonging – I simplify some things, hide others, and casually lie when convenient.

Despite the unpleasant aftertaste of these performances, the tensions motivating my resort to half-truths, strategic simplifications and circumstantial lies are nothing new: Like many other academic domains, anthropology has its own disciplinary culture, and methodology is perhaps the level at which disciplinary discursivity is at its most evident. Foregrounding the spatial and temporal dimensions of one’s fieldwork remains a reliable marker of authority, and narrowing down one’s interests to a bounded community and a well-defined topic still helps expert validation.

At the same time, the relative novelty of certain research domains (in my case, vernacular creativity on digital media) makes them more prone to generalizations, and requires simplifying the presentation of one’s work when pushing back against insinuations of “having it too easy” with fieldwork done by “simply spending all day on social media” to follow “fashionable topics” such as Internet memes, selfies or online celebrity.

One of the pieces of writing that most helped me come to terms with this feeling of unease is a Gary Alan Fine article titled “Ten lies of ethnography” (1993). In this liberating piece, Fine skirts the fascination for laying bare the uncomfortable truths of the trade, and instead focuses on the unavoidable practices of lying that accompany much ethnographic research. According to Fine, illusions about the underside of ethnography, regularly hidden in its methodological backstage, are necessary for both the production of good work and occupational survival, but become problematic when they take root in the discipline and become taken for real by its practitioners.

Inspired by how Fine identifies ten lies of ethnography behind the classical virtues and technical skills of figures such as the “friendly ethnographer,” the “unobtrusive ethnographer” and the “chaste ethnographer”, I want to put forward three more lies peculiar to digital ethnography, which I briefly describe below, accompanied by their respective authorial archetypes.

The networked field-weaver

The first lie of digital ethnography is related to one of the most widely debated ethnographic constructions – the ‘field’. Questioned, fragmented and deconstructed in the wake of the writing culture debates, the field remains an important anchor for ethnographic practice. When I embarked into my (by then overly-theorized) fieldwork, the most convincing metaphor I had come across was the one offered by Jenna Burrell in her proposition of the “field site as network” (2009). Building upon previous theorizations of multi-sited ethnography, Burrell emphasizes how it is the ethnographer herself, through the everyday tracing of different actors, that pulls together the field as a network.

I found myself adopting Burrell’s insight as an effective soundbite: My own “field as network” included a bunch of friend and acquaintances, longer and shorter stays in eight Chinese cities, a number of online platforms, an inventory of mobile devices, a sample of linguistic repertoires, certain genres of online content, mass media discourses about the internet, and a variety of media practices.

As many solutions that seem to work all too well, I started realizing that my idealized reliance on weaving my field as a network was built on hiding and lying about something. Rather than experiencing the expansive movement of branching out promised by this metaphor, I often found myself building my “field as network” by grasping at straws, and immediately cutting away most of what came along with them. Weaving networks into an ethnographic field can bring the most disparate things together, and particularly when one’s research topic isn’t extremely narrow, each node of the network can result in dizzying vertigos over a wealth of potential interlocutors, unexplored communities, or entirely new categories of data.

In order to decide what does or doesn’t belong in one’s research project (and, ultimately, to produce a viable written report) the ethnographer continuously prunes down networks as they proliferate, carving out a skeletal “field as network” that eventually feels more like a crooked bonsai tree than an expanse of thick experiential wilderness. The lie of the ethnographer as networked field-weaver should be kept in mind as it hides the cutting as much it glorifies the pulling together.

The eager participant-lurker

The second lie of digital ethnography relates to the central practice of this research approach: Participant observation. Participation in digital media bleeds over a linear spectrum going from non-use to intensive and active presence, and extends in different dimensions according to the platforms used, the devices at hand, software availability, access to connectivity in time and space, as well as the social circles and practices one participates in.

In the earliest pioneering ethnographies of online settings, researchers found in the figure of the ‘lurker’ a productive archetype embodying the contradictory status of participation on the internet. Reflecting on this figure of participation, Leander & McKim (2003) conclude that, in choosing between being an active participant or a lurker, a digital ethnographer makes important epistemological decisions. Given the increasing variety of modes of participation offered by digital media platforms, more recent debates have tried to move beyond a clear-cut choice between active participation and lurking, and to instead explore the creation of intersubjectivity as a fluid outcome of a sustained ethnographic engagement (Beaulieau, 2004).

While cognizant of this fluid spectrum of modes of participation, I still feel the need to condense my engagement into simplified vignettes highlighting my presence in various digitally-mediated contexts, flattening my involvement into easily understandable nuggets of interaction that prove my active participation in the field. Confronted by the injunctions of participant observation, I often write myself into an eager participant-lurker: A professionally naive explorer of local online contexts, master of all modes of participation, surveying digital media use from a vantage point of carefully crafted presence.

The false choice between naturalist lurking and active involvement is something I still struggle with whenever I inscribe myself onto the field. As digital ethnographers, we participate (just like our ‘research participants’) through a wide range of modes of participation tightly linked to social dynamics and technological affordances that go from the choice of shutting off one’s smartphone to the visceral need to sustain one’s presence in a tense online discussion. Embracing the fluidity, uncertainty and ambivalence resulting from these situated choices should be preferred over flattening one’s own persona into the stereotyped figure of the eager participant-lurker.

The expert fabricator

The third lie of digital ethnography has to do with representation, an unavoidable component of producing any sort of research output. Digital ethnographers have the advantage of working with already thoroughly-mediated settings, and are able to include in their reports samples of online resources, snippets of mediated interactions, creative data visualizations, as well as images, videos and sounds. Yet, the increasing availability of multimedia traces does not mean that ethnographic texts become less representational. Even when grounded on extensive datasets, hundreds of fieldnotes and collections of user traces, the accounts produced by digital ethnographers end up including an extremely narrow selection of inscriptions, often thoroughly edited, translated, scrambled, rephrased, anonymized, cropped, selectively blurred and collated according to a bundle of ethical, rhetorical and aesthetic decisions.

Responding to the recurring dilemmas faced by researchers dealing with new and heterogeneous concretions of data, Annette Markham provocatively argues that digital ethnographers should embrace the suspicious practice of fabrication in order to overcome paralyzing tendencies in qualitative research, and to embed ethics inductively into research practice (2012, p. 341). Fabrication, though, is inextricably linked to the idea of expertise. In claiming and embracing one’s role as editor, translator and fabricator of multimedia composites of events, identities and inscriptions, the digital ethnographer implicitly establishes competence and knowledgeability over a certain sociotechnical context.

While I enjoy the flattering attributions of expertise over my research topic that these fabrications occasionally grant me, I often feel troubled by the way they blur my authorial role into the figure of the social media savvy or the computer geek, hiding how most of my ethnographic knowledge is actually grounded on a patchy process of discovery, a messy interaction between my puzzled inquiries and the kind help of patient friends who bear with my often clueless questions about the latest Internet meme or slang term.

Digital ethnographers are often closer to practical brokers, curious newcomers relying on the knowledgeability and interpretive guidance of what Holmes & Marcus call “paraethnographers” (2008). It is important to remember how the figure of the expert fabricator can become an enticing professional illusion that easily overrides the messy, processual and thickly social construction of local expertise.

How to lie with digital ethnography

The goal of this post is decidedly not to “tell the truth” in the (ideally) public space of an academic blog, nor to reveal an ugly or cynical reality behind my practice of digital ethnography, nor to accuse colleagues of engaging in dishonesty and deception; rather, the three illusive figures described above embody discursive strategies, performative misdirections and illusory identities that I regularly confront in my thinking, speaking and writing about my own research work.

My hope is that both colleagues approaching the disciplinary domain of digital ethnography, as well as fellow researchers already familiar with this methodological assemblage, will recognize their own doubts and concerns in some of these sketched portraits. As Gary Alan Fine reminds us, it is important to constantly ask ourselves: Which professional illusions are current in our research field? Which issues do we pressure each other to devise half-truths about? Which circumstantial lies do we use to cover the tracks leading to our decisions?

Rather than telling readers how to ‘do’ digital ethnography, I’d rather suggest that we familiarize ourselves with the lies hidden by the contemporary archetypes of the networked field-weaver, the eager participant-lurker and the expert fabricator, before they become professional illusions hiding more than they reveal.

Image credits: This essay is illustrated by @deathnography

Dr Gabriele de Seta is a media anthropologist. He holds a PhD in Sociology from the Hong Kong Polytechnic University and has recently completed a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica in Taipei, Taiwan. His research work, grounded on ethnographic engagement across multiple sites, focuses on digital media practices and vernacular creativity in contemporary China. He is also interested in experimental music scenes, Internet art, and collaborative intersections between anthropology and art practice. More information is available on his website.

Crystal Abidin

Dr Crystal Abidin is a socio-cultural anthropologist of vernacular internet cultures, particularly young people’s relationships with internet celebrity, self-curation, and vulnerability. She is Postdoctoral Fellow with the Media Management and Transformation Centre (MMTC) at Jönköping University, and Adjunct Researcher with the Centre for Culture and Technology (CCAT) at Curtin University. Crystal’s forthcoming book, Internet Celebrity: Understanding Fame Online (Emerald Publishing, 2018) critically analyzes the contemporary histories and impacts of internet-native celebrity today. Reach her at wishcrys.com or @wishcrys.

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We Have Never Been Digital Anthropologists
by Rebekah Cupitt

Ethnography: A Chimera

Ethnography is the methodological chimera of Anthropology, composed of a snake (the researcher, who insinuates into other people’s lives), a lion (the fieldwork, the daunting practice through which we fall bodily into an ‘other’s’ world), and a goat (the task of writing, that has us consuming our fieldwork experiences, masticating and digesting them into the more palatable documents that we then publish and share). Ethnography is a multi-headed beast with mythical qualities – and I am of course paraphrasing John Law here, who writes that method in the social sciences is a multi-headed beast (Law 2004, p. 4). In this post, I want to foreground the chimeric nature of ethnography because it was only once I situated myself in an interdisciplinary research setting and a technologically saturated field site, that I realized how little the epistemological frameworks and methodological toolkits of digital anthropology had prepared me to make sense of the digital itself.

While all heads of the ethnographic chimera warrant examination, the primary focus of this short blog post is on the lion’s head: The fieldwork experience that roars loud enough to be heard even in other disciplines. How does ethnography shift, change and morph when it is carried out in digitally saturated settings? Here follow some reflections upon my own experiences of doing research at Swedish Television alongside the production team that creates and curates its programming in Swedish Sign Language (SVT Teckenspråk). Doing participant observation and becoming entangled with the people and other entities at SVT Teckenspråk left me considering how the very foundations of ethnography relate to the digital. As a result, I began to wonder whether the notion of ‘digital anthropology’ has not perhaps become inordinate.

The Lion: Fieldwork

Arguably, the fiercest head of the ethnographic chimera is the lion: The practice of fieldwork an ethnography is based upon. In my case, fieldwork included participant observation, interviews, photographs, films – you know, the regular devices of field research. Fieldwork is perhaps the one aspect of Anthropology that, through its sheer dogmatism, stands as the proud figurehead of the discipline. Since the Malinowskian cries about extended periods of “isolated study” in the Trobriand Islands, to the Geertzian occupation of the native’s point of view, and into contemporary debates on the form fieldwork should take (Marcus & Okely 2008), fieldwork has been Anthropology’s primary method of understanding ‘the other’, digital or otherwise. Each field site is distinct, and a first step on our roads to becoming professional anthropologists requires us to navigate our First Encounters and adapt our methodologies as a compulsory rite de passage.

Finding myself in a field site that stretched from technologically saturated editing suites, sound mixing rooms and film studios to equally technological filming locations, video meeting rooms, and the production team’s own computer-centered office spaces, my primary difficulty was fitting my own fieldwork practices and conceptualization of the digital with those of the employees at SVT Teckenspråk. In the daily lives of the Swedish Television’s production team that worked hard on programming in Swedish Sign Language, the digital was unremarkable and mundane.

At SVT Teckenspråk, technology is important in some settings but unimportant in others; it is new and old in a disconcerting mix. Brand new mixing equipment interfaces with archaic microphones; a top-of-the-line monitor is connected to a 7-year old video-meeting system; someone is running a brand new version of Microsoft Office on an outdated PC, and so on. The definition of new technology is not as fixed as we might assume, and what seems entirely new soon becomes thoroughly old. What we perhaps mean, as anthropologists, when we talk about ‘new technologies’, is that we are ourselves discovering new communication forms that are carried out via technologies that are as new to us as they are to our discipline. At SVT Teckenspråk, the entire workplace was rife with technologies of work – new, old, redundant, essential – all tangled up in one big mess of cables.

However, a conflict arises when a reference to the digital comes to signify a new disciplinary frontier on the researcher’s end: Emphasizing the digital as a way to contribute to the understanding of society at large, and to prove that Anthropology still matters. A scale of possible responses to this contradiction stretches across a spectrum including: The extreme decision to abandon the native’s point of view and depict a field site rife with objects of digital anthropological fascination; a choice to render the objects as conduits for novel human behavior while emphasizing their embeddedness in pre-existing patterns of everyday life; or an equally radical stance that gives up posturing the digital as a new frontier and instead recognizes that the field under study is a place filled with practices much like the one the researcher herself may come from – where technology is inextricably and unassumingly entangled in the everyday. Confronted with this dilemma, I chose the last option, but only after pondering on a critical question: How can fieldwork of the mundane be carried out when the researcher themselves is conceptualizing their fieldwork as discovering ‘new’ sociocultural territory? The implicit futurist and technocentric innovation and pioneering spirit I was surrounded by in my interdisciplinary setting colored the analysis and the tone of my ethnographic text.

We Are Beast

While it is certainly more common in digital anthropology today to side-line rhetorics of novelty, exotic digital practices, and fantastical democratic possibilities that open up new avenues for revolution, carrying out anthropological research in interdisciplinary and technocentric fields of research demands a more considered approach to an ethnography of the digital. At SVT Teckenspråk, everyday work was the production of digital television using digital tools, and communicating was often mediated by digital technologies such as video meeting technologies. I, the researcher, documented, analyzed and wrote about the everyday communication that took place as a part of television production in Swedish Sign Language using digital tools, and was as engulfed by digital technologies as the fellow researchers who studied, designed and developed in the offices and labs right next to my own. There was no end to the digital, and no moment in which it was absent. It was simply there, entangled with people and their everyday lives.

Rather than a new frontier or object of study, the so-called digital has become a companion to the non-digital in the sense that Haraway means when she talks about companion species (2010). The digitally driven cultural revolution seems to have been exaggerated, and we have instead undergone a kind of “symbiogenesis” of the digital and the human (Haraway 2010, p. 15ff). The digital and the human are bonded in “significant otherness”, and to focus on one as a driver of change and use it to explain the other is to miss their critical entanglements and to not take these posthuman relationships seriously enough. This intertwining of technology and the human is well-acknowledged by researchers in STS, techno-anthropology and certain strands of the digital humanities, and yet the continued use of the term ‘digital’ begs the apparently unanswerable questions: If technology is now mundane and its centrality to our ethnographies becomes an analytical artifice or, at worst, a strategy to secure funding, are we still digital anthropologists? Is there still meaning in this moniker? Or is it so that, not only have we never been modern (Latour 1993), but we have never been digital either?

Dr Rebekah Cupitt is an academic precariate currently navigating post-phd life and researching deaf culture, technology and deaf visuality on the sly. She has a doctorate in mediated communication from KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden, and her research generally takes a critical and anti-normative approach to the socio-technical, questions the empowering capabilities and other design fictions that underlie human technologies.

Crystal Abidin

Dr Crystal Abidin is a socio-cultural anthropologist of vernacular internet cultures, particularly young people’s relationships with internet celebrity, self-curation, and vulnerability. She is Postdoctoral Fellow with the Media Management and Transformation Centre (MMTC) at Jönköping University, and Adjunct Researcher with the Centre for Culture and Technology (CCAT) at Curtin University. Crystal’s forthcoming book, Internet Celebrity: Understanding Fame Online (Emerald Publishing, 2018) critically analyzes the contemporary histories and impacts of internet-native celebrity today. Reach her at wishcrys.com or @wishcrys.

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Somewhere Between Here and There: Goldilocking Between Fieldwork and Academia
by Crystal Abidin

One of my fondest memories from fieldwork is learning how to survive an eyelash curler.

More specifically, I sat for two agonizing hours at a rather public and populated ice-cream parlour on a weekday night in Singapore, with three friends who took turns to cup my chin, tilt my forehead, stretch the skin around my eye socket, and clamp my eyelashes between two slates of shiny metal. They also kept threatening to rob me of all my eyelashes (by way of yanking them out) if I didn’t stop flinching out of fear.

You see, earlier in the evening I had bemoaned to my besties that only two of the 50 prospective informants I had emailed responded to me. After six months of pre-fieldwork training between hours of methodology masterclasses and dozens of guidebooks, I had crafted what I anticipated to be my golden ticket into the field of social media Influencers in Singapore.

My official invitation emails came accompanied by the University letterhead (in color, no less), my supervisor’s signature and contact details (a clearly non-Singaporean, foreign-sounding name with the status-elevating designation, ‘Professor’), and I hoped that documentation of my ethics clearance (in bureaucratic legalese peppered with strings of conscientiously cross-referenced numbers) would signpost my legitimacy as an academic researcher. Having grown up in paper-chasing, bureaucratic Singapore for 20 years before immigrating to Australia, I was confident that my perfectly crafted invitation letter had hit my prospective informants’ sweet spots: Congruent branding, endorsements from a foreign expert, and pristine organizational skills.

But I could not have been more wrong.

Months passed and still, only two of 50 potential informants had responded. And I was to meet the first of them in person for a coffee the very next day. Being incredibly inept at makeup (I had only ever put on makeup twice in my childhood for choir competitions), my caring, fashionable friends were convinced that the glamorous world of hyper-feminine Influencers would surely reject me. And thus we embarked on a mini-excursion to a pharmacy where my friends imparted girl literacies to me while filling my shopping basket with a concealer, sunblock, facial toner, facial masks, anti-blemish cream, and that dreaded eyelash curler (which I have since conveniently misplaced…).

As it turns out, my friends were only half-right.

As fieldwork progressed, it became clear to me that my very lack of feminine ‘beautifying’ skills endeared me to many of the women I was studying who decidedly took me under their wing – they were, after all, perceived as role models and opinion leaders on beauty, fashion, and lifestyle by hundreds of thousands of other women online. I realized that much of the social currency I needed to access my field was tied to performing a very particular type of femininity, one that entailed unabashedly visibilizing some of my ineptitude and vulnerability to people I barely knew.

And this was counter-intuitive.

Young scholars like myself are constantly being told to establish the visibility of our portfolios in order to secure academic jobs that are increasingly competitive, scarce, and precarious. We learn to package and pitch productive and pristine versions of ourselves. Yet, for all my theoretical and practical training on visibilizing the self, I soon learnt that such visibility politics, in which academics aim for maximum self-celebratory exposure, did not lend itself well to my ethnographic research into the even more competitive attention economy of social media Influencers. Simply put, the value of my academic social capital did not transpose into their microcelebrity community, and my visibility as an emerging scholar was not easily deciphered through their established cultural vocabulary of celebrity.

I had not anticipated that researching an ecology of Influencers that mainly played out in digital spaces entailed so much corporeal posturing of my body in physical spaces. Live demonstrations of ‘How To Girl’ took place in the privacy of their homes and offices, as well as in not-so-private cafés and food courts. For instance, I bought my first pair of high heels during fieldwork, under the coaxing of a 23-year-old Influencer who had let me try hers on. Even though they often chuckled at my clumsy attempts, these corporeal experiments were slowly winning the favour of some Influencers, who in turn signposted their approval and insider knowledge of my attempts in person and on social media.

It seemed to matter to them that I was invested and sincere enough to ‘try’ out their worlds – not too little that I was merely a dispassionate auditor, and not too much that I was attempting to emulate and compete with them in their ‘game’. These experiences taught me how to visibly posture myself as a willing apprentice, much unlike the veneer of professionalism in academia where young scholars are conditioned into hiding our fears and failures in honour of peacocking. In the field, I learnt to selectively put my lack and inferiorities on display as an invitation for my informants to guide me and role model the ‘right’ way. As a living work-in-progress, entrusting my informants with the access to witness my learning and growth while risking the fear of scrutiny solicited their care and affirmation.

And thus, despite our months and years of preparation for fieldwork, a vast majority of what digital ethnographers actually do in the field is based on gut-feeling, sensing, and whim. In my case, this entailed learning to perform a specific type of ‘visibility labour’ along various spectrums of conspicuousness, where navigating the ‘insider’ and ‘outsider’ scapes necessitated the continuous reinscribing of my body visually, discursively, emotively, and symbolically as I felt my way around. In other words, alongside my constant ‘seeing’ of the scene, it was more important for me to manage how selected parts of my intersectional identity should be ‘seen’, and how much of these traits to put on ‘show’.

Displaying an overt visibility (such as dressing too similar to my informants or being too outspoken at social gatherings) might be misconstrued as a desire to emulate my informants’ microcelebrity, that I was competing with them for attention or ‘stealing their thunder’, and I would risk a festering sense of threat and distrust towards myself within our homosocial settings. Yet, being too invisible (such as underdressing for exclusive events or not participating in social media conversations) might also be read as a general disinterest in their craft, or worst still, that my inability to acquire the appropriate insider literacies would permanently mark me as an outlier who would never qualify to inhabit their life worlds.

Like the Goldilocks of digital ethnographers, I had to be visible towards and among my informants, but not too little and not too much. In navigating these spectrums of conspicuousness, I had to glide along the gradient of low to high visibilities, and hop across them as required by circumstances. All this footing work was akin to wax globules in a lava lamp, alternating in existence as heated liquids and cooled solids, always in motion and constantly wandering somewhere between here and there.

Cover image: Taken by the author during fieldwork at the Influence Asia 2017 awards, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

Dr Crystal Abidin is a socio-cultural anthropologist of vernacular internet cultures, particularly young people’s relationships with internet celebrity, self-curation, and vulnerability. Her forthcoming books look at internet celebrity, Influencers, blogshops, and Instagram cultures. Crystal is Postdoctoral Fellow with the Media Management and Transformation Centre (MMTC) at Jönköping University, and Adjunct Researcher with the Centre for Culture and Technology (CCAT) at Curtin University. Reach her at wishcrys.com or @wishcrys.

Crystal Abidin

Dr Crystal Abidin is a socio-cultural anthropologist of vernacular internet cultures, particularly young people’s relationships with internet celebrity, self-curation, and vulnerability. She is Postdoctoral Fellow with the Media Management and Transformation Centre (MMTC) at Jönköping University, and Adjunct Researcher with the Centre for Culture and Technology (CCAT) at Curtin University. Crystal’s forthcoming book, Internet Celebrity: Understanding Fame Online (Emerald Publishing, 2018) critically analyzes the contemporary histories and impacts of internet-native celebrity today. Reach her at wishcrys.com or @wishcrys.

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A Digital Bermuda Triangle: The Perils of Doing Ethnography on Darknet Drug Markets
by Alexia Maddox

Media reports sensationalize the dark web as a seedy digital location where drugs, guns, hitmen and child pornography circulate through eBay-style marketplaces that are only accessible to your hacker types. Here, elusive fringe behaviors proliferate in plain sight, with identities hidden through encryption technologies and secretive user cultures. In 2013, I began collaborating on a digital ethnography of the most popular darknet drug market, Silk Road. The social impacts of this kind of choice-driven, highly visible yet anonymous, peer-to-peer drug market were unknown. The research was led by Dr. Monica Barratt, a social scientist at the Drug Policy Modelling Program, part of Australia’s National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre at the University of New South Wales. Together, we considered the Silk Road community to be a great place to start studying the impacts of choice-driven drug availability upon people’s drug use trajectories. What we found was so much more than that.

In this post, I’ll cover what it is like to work in online spaces that disappear overnight, and discuss the levels of visibility people adopt in these disrupted and disruptive spaces. The question of ‘how to’ do ethnographic research in a contentious and dynamic environment such as Silk Road led me to formulate the notions of ‘site instability’ and of ‘contentious visibility’. Moving away from sensationalizing fringe activities on digital media, I found a nuanced and internet-oriented notion of healthcare emerging among Silk Road users, which I describe here as systemic ‘selfcare’.

As a researcher, I am drawn to digital spaces where people are using and creating innovations in networked technologies to engineer – both socially and computationally – a more permissive reality. I see these digital frontiers as collective and constructed resistance spaces that act as cultural laboratories through which alternative futures are experienced. Not all of these socio-technical experiments gain traction and uptake, yet they lay down the technologies, ideas and experiences from which we learn.

Whenever I present this research project, a common response that I receive is one of intellectual curiosity, yet mixed with personal rejection and distancing. Working with a community with strong liberal values, a requirement of anonymity and an underlying libertarian ethos all surrounding a drug market operating in the darknet can be polarizing and confronting, and there were times where it was for me as well. However, I began my research with a process of social sensitization and non-judgement by understanding that there are different ways to approach structural problems, social marginalization and culturally stigmatized prohibitions in our societies.

By nature, this community’s ways of establishing ‘the self’ in the environment was going to be combative, and their perspectives towards personal and public health and wellbeing were going to challenge centralized regulatory practices and perspectives. This empathetic connection and space for social difference that I drew on to assist my research practice were the strengths of an ethnographic approach. Its weakness, however, is in dealing with anonymous online populations and field sites that disappear. Both of these aspects were at play in the research, and yet the mobility and real-time connection with community that ethnography emphasizes ended up being the greatest assets to completing this work, as we will see.

Our research into the social implication of cryptomarkets took place between 2013 and 2015, and focused on people who had purchased drugs on Silk Road, a cryptomarket founded by Dread Pirate Roberts in 2011. Cryptomarkets are e-commerce websites that operate in the ‘dark web’, commonly referred to as darknet markets (DNMs). The dark web, as an anonymous online space, has allowed drug sales to become highly visible and enacted through peer-to-peer market structures that allow vendors and purchasers to gain and lose reputation and business deals through recommendation and rating systems. Associated forums gather together people who wish to discuss drug-related issues and harm-reduction strategies with people across the world, and reviewing the quality of the drugs they’ve purchased through trip reports and vendor insights. From October 2013 to June 2014, I conducted my ethnographic fieldwork by engaging online with the digital community surrounding Silk Road that was active in these forums.

The dark web can be thought of as a ‘digital Bermuda Triangle’. It is a dynamic space with websites that regularly change their Internet Protocol (IP) address (the unique identifier of each device connected to the internet) and often appear or disappear overnight. When Monica and I launched our study, Silk Road had successfully avoided ongoing law-enforcement efforts to shut it down through vigilant anonymization practices and encryption technologies. This successful resistance to state regulation lent the website a sense of stability that made it seem impenetrable. Yet, just as we launched the data collection component of the research (i.e., me entering into active recruitment and research engagement in the Silk Road forums), the FBI suddenly shut the site down.

Other than the sinking feeling of having put all my research eggs in one digital basket, I was there to observe the outpouring of grief and loss that the community felt in having their shared and constructed space abruptly taken offline. They knew that other drug markets would quickly take its place, but they mourned the loss of a collective culture that offered them a safe space in a highly contentious and risky environment. This mobility of people and practices across online environments taught me a key lesson as a digital ethnographer. This lesson was to not get attached to any one ‘site’ as the location of community, and to be prepared for some form of ‘site instability’ during the course of fieldwork. Therefore, each site should be thought of as a vessel traversing the digital Bermuda Triangle, potentially disappearing at any moment, and resilient strategies are needed for researching site-specific populations that are accustomed to dealing with this sort of turbulent and unstable online environment.

As I attempted to raise the visibility of our research project and conduct interviews among the community, I encountered several ethical conundrums. A central concern of the study, for both myself and Silk Road participants, was how personal visibility was to be negotiated in order to avoid vulnerability in this highly contentious social context – an issue I identify as ‘contentious visibility’. When posting about our research project in the Silk Road forums and associated online spaces, the striking dichotomy in communication styles explicitly revealed the local climate of contention and exposed an ethos through which community members gained traction (and satisfaction) from their capacity to attack one another, while masking themselves through posturing and belligerence.

In contrast to the Silk Road community members, I was highly visible and identifiable across online spaces and through my professional identity, working according to ‘best practices’ in trying to engage and recruit people into what may have been considered a risky endeavor for participants. Responses to the recruitment post ranged from endorsing the scope and security practices that the research was founded on to questioning both the credibility and impact of our work. Dialogue ranged from well written to opinionated and straight-out bullying, with the thread ending after a death threat. The contentious visibility that was evident in this dialogue was engendered by the playful and purposive splitting of online identities and the movement of users between multiple sites, which can make forum banning and blocking practices ineffective. These disruptive, fragmented and evasive practices are also characteristic of the distributed attachment that drives identity creation (both individual and communal) in cryptomarket spaces.

Why does this matter? Well, understanding contentious visibility in the unstable sites of cryptomarkets contributes to removing the veil from how people view, for example, their own health practices and the role of drug choice and consumption in relation to wellbeing. The healthcare and legislative systems in many countries are set to regulate drug consumption, positioning people as patients whose health conditions are subject to, and defined by, medical practitioners. During my fieldwork, it became obvious that the feisty Silk Road forum participants had a vastly different perspective on this issue.

From our research we found that there was indeed a contrast between their understanding and experiences of healthcare versus their choice-driven preferences for pathways to wellbeing, which I label ‘selfcare’. For some participants, the notion of healthcare was a constrictive regulatory system within which health practitioners produce authoritative diagnoses and hold the capacity to prescribe a suitable treatment and define the appropriate medications. This centralized system of authoritative and prescribed health support was, by its very nature, not resonating with the skepticism and sense of personal sovereignty that characterized the narratives and perspectives of many within the comminity surrounding Silk Road. Building on notions of power, self-directed health choices, and structural inhibition within the existing system of healthcare, one participant argued that responsibility regarding health and medication should be solely in the hands of the purchaser.

This ideation of self-directed care, including self-diagnosis and self-medication, is somewhat different from conceptualizations of online selfcare. Online selfcare is commonly seen as online information provision (such as that found in the Mayo Clinic website) and social support spaces. For the Silk Road community, however, online selfcare moved beyond information access and support, and included personal diagnosis and drug/medication purchasing through the cryptomarket. The debate surrounding the wisdom of this perspective is no doubt an ongoing one; however, the ‘flat’ structure of cryptomarkets, allowing them to retail illicit drugs and prescription drugs without distinction, does indeed reframe the power dynamics inherent to contemporary healthcare systems.

We have been able to draw many insights from this research and I am very grateful for the time, interest and patience that many members of this community showed me as I learnt the technical ropes and gained an understanding of the people involved and their online environment. In this post, I’ve highlighted how a disappearing field site, contentious visibility and an alternative notion of selfcare emerged from these interactions. These insights have the capacity to inform future digital ethnographic practice and to provide more nuanced insights into the online populations operating in digital fringes. As researchers entering this sort of digital Bermuda Triangle, we have the opportunity to observe ephemeral social experiments in alternative futures, but we also need to ensure that our research vessels are ‘seaworthy’, that we are open to the unexpected, and prepared with a resilient strategy for engaging contentious populations.

Cover image: Author unknown (2015), retrieved from online source.

Dr Alexia Maddox, Lecturer in Communication at the Deakin University School of Communication and Creative Arts, is a digital sociologist interested in the social impacts of technology, including social media and digital networked technologies. She studies digital frontiers and communities with stigmatized populations using technology to create and connect in emerging spaces online. Her recent book, ‘Research Methods and Global Online Communities: A case study’ (Routledge, 2015) presents an approach to mixed-methods research and is written to support postgraduate and early career researchers exploring these evolving social spaces through a myriad of techniques.

Crystal Abidin

Dr Crystal Abidin is a socio-cultural anthropologist of vernacular internet cultures, particularly young people’s relationships with internet celebrity, self-curation, and vulnerability. She is Postdoctoral Fellow with the Media Management and Transformation Centre (MMTC) at Jönköping University, and Adjunct Researcher with the Centre for Culture and Technology (CCAT) at Curtin University. Crystal’s forthcoming book, Internet Celebrity: Understanding Fame Online (Emerald Publishing, 2018) critically analyzes the contemporary histories and impacts of internet-native celebrity today. Reach her at wishcrys.com or @wishcrys.

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Private Messages from the Field: Confessions on Digital Ethnography and Its Discomforts
by Crystal Abidin & Gabriele de Seta

Here’s a first confession about ethnographic work: All professional things have personal beginnings.

We are today writing this introduction as editors of a series of confessional posts about the discomforts of digital ethnography, but we met three years ago at a pub table, two doctoral candidates sharing a brief moment of co-presence right in the middle of a graduate summer school. Sitting in front of each other for the first time in a week, we broke the ice by latching on sparse disciplinary markers we had been peppering our public utterances with, hoping for someone to notice. The summer school we were attending was a decidedly interdisciplinary event, and retreating into a common discursive domain was a cozy convenience: “So… are you an anthropologist? Who is your go-to author?”

Namedropping snowballed. What digital media did we study, where, and how did we go about it? The loud conversations piling up across the long pub table receded into the background as we masked intimate feeling out with ethnographic geeking out. For the following week of seminars, our backstage dialogues originating at a pub table continued as an exchange of direct messages on Twitter – we did truly slide in each other’s DMs before it was even a meme. After we left the summer school, the social media private message backchannel remained our go-to pocket of intimacy for any communication that didn’t belong to e-mail, Facebook comments or postcards.

For a long while, this newfound space seemed to us truly special and unique. And it still does today, to be honest, every time we scroll upwards into thousands of daily textual exchanges peppered with images, reaction GIFs, emoji, and URLs: a running stream of co-constructed presence bridging over time zones and life stages, that has over the years become an intimate archive of the theoretical, methodological, practical, professional, affective and emotional struggles of two early-career academics who still find important to brand themselves as ‘digital ethnographers’.

And yet, in time, we have also come to realize that this secret pouch of Twitter DMs was just one example of a communication genre we have broadly termed ‘private messages from the field’: intimate backchannels precariously established and dedicatedly sustained by ethnographers away from their professional fronts, a variety of relational spaces ranging from cozy post-conference pub retreats to digital versions of Ray Oldenburg’s “third places” (1989). Many of our colleagues turned out to be also sharing their troubles through mailing lists and Facebook groups, WhatsApp conversations and Skype calls; social media privacy settings were adjusted to select the appropriate audiences for emotional rants and disciplinary venting, while multimodality helped bringing reciprocal care and careful intimacy into the backstage of an often geographically dispersed profession.

We like to think that one of the first ‘private messages from the field’ was sent by Jen Clodius, a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who was doing research on community formation in Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs). In a “Report from the field” that she shared with other AAA Anthropology Newsletter readers in 1994, she warned: “Conducting ethnography on the InterNet presents a whole new series of chalenges and problems for the anthropologist.” These challenges and problems included issues of identity and performativity, authenticity and trust, community rules and moral norms, as well as complex and shifting ethical dilemmas.

More than two decades after Clodius’s field report from the world of MUDs, doing research on, through and about digital media remains challenging and problematic, a state of epistemological uncertainty that is compounded and perhaps even amplified by the relative novelty of sociotechnical arrangements and the quick turnover of platforms and services. And yet, despite the refinement of ‘digital ethnography’ into countless disciplinary variants, most methodological manuals pay little attention to how digital ethnographers themselves cope with these challenges and problems by exchanging private messages from the field through the very same digital media they do research through, on and about.

For this reason, years after our summer school pub encounter, and thousands of Twitter DMs later, we have decided to open up our private message folders, so to say, and put together a collection of essays illustrating the messiness of digital media research in the making. In order to give our essays an intimate, personal perspective, we have encouraged authors to draw their inspiration from a couple of sources: the genre of confessional ethnographic writing outlined by John Van Maanen (2011), and the unabashed disclosure of what Gary Alan Fine (1993) calls the “lies of ethnography”. Our hope is that, by confessing troubling epistemological choices and sharing our ways of coping with methodological discomforts, we contribute to demystifying disciplinary canons and reminding readers of how digital media (and the ways of researching them) are always in the making.

There is no denying it: The practice of digital ethnography entails anxieties, challenges, concerns, dilemmas, doubts, problems, tensions and troubles; and it is not a surprise that many researchers that decide to adopt an ethnographic approach to study digital media end up dedicating some thought and writing to these methodological discomforts. Rather than delving into sectarian discussions of the sub-branding and out-branching of the (broadly intended) disciplinary domain of digital ethnography, the posts featured in this series respond to a call beautifully formulated by John Law in his book After Method:

Parts of the world are caught in our ethnographies, our histories and our statistics. But other parts are not, or if they are then this is because they have been distorted into clarity. […] Perhaps we will need to know them through ‘private’ emotions that open us to worlds of sensibilities, passions, intuitions, fears and betrayals. (2004, pp. 2-3)

This is the goal of this series of posts: to get to know and talk about parts of our worlds that are not usually caught in our digital ethnographies, and to do so through private emotions, discomforting confessions and shared intimacies. We would do this work through our private messages anyway, so we might as well open it up for once, and try to welcome readers to the field of a “digital ethnography” intended less as a prescriptive collection of research strategies and more as an inclusive methodological common ground for scholars doing ethnographic research on, through and about digital media.

Private Messages from the Field is a collection of posts that summarize the contents of a yet unpublished journal issue which the editors have been working on during the past year. These sneak peeks into our arguments, kindly hosted by anthro{dendum}, are a precious occasion for our authors to float a few ideas about the discomforts of doing digital ethnography for a broader audience before they become inevitably “distorted into clarity” by peer-review, revisions and paywalls. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in various global contexts (Australia, China, Singapore, Sweden) on topics ranging from the dark web to collaborative translation, and from internet celebrity to organizational media use, the posts collected in this series are offered as comforting missives to anthropology students, early-career researchers and seasoned scholars dabbling in the troubling but rewarding practice of digital ethnography.

If you have any comments, you are welcome to send us a private message.

Dr Crystal Abidin is a socio-cultural anthropologist of vernacular internet cultures, particularly young people’s relationships with internet celebrity, self-curation, and vulnerability. Her forthcoming books look at internet celebrity, Influencers, blogshops, and Instagram cultures. Crystal is Postdoctoral Fellow with the Media Management and Transformation Centre (MMTC) at Jönköping University, and Adjunct Researcher with the Centre for Culture and Technology (CCAT) at Curtin University. Reach her at wishcrys.com or @wishcrys.

Dr Gabriele de Seta is a media anthropologist. He holds a PhD in Sociology from the Hong Kong Polytechnic University and has recently completed a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica in Taipei, Taiwan. His research work, grounded on ethnographic engagement across multiple sites, focuses on digital media practices and vernacular creativity in contemporary China. He is also interested in experimental music scenes, Internet art, and collaborative intersections between anthropology and art practice. More information is available on his website.

The editors contributed equally to this project and are named alphabetically.

We are seeking academic journals to publish the edited collection of full-length articles on which this collection of blogposts are based, and would love to hear from interested parties.

Crystal Abidin

Dr Crystal Abidin is a socio-cultural anthropologist of vernacular internet cultures, particularly young people’s relationships with internet celebrity, self-curation, and vulnerability. She is Postdoctoral Fellow with the Media Management and Transformation Centre (MMTC) at Jönköping University, and Adjunct Researcher with the Centre for Culture and Technology (CCAT) at Curtin University. Crystal’s forthcoming book, Internet Celebrity: Understanding Fame Online (Emerald Publishing, 2018) critically analyzes the contemporary histories and impacts of internet-native celebrity today. Reach her at wishcrys.com or @wishcrys.

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