These are my people! // reading reflection

I’ll be missing my last Nonfiction lab this week to head to a research masterclass run by DERC and Young and Well. One of the sessions will be run by Crystal Abidin, a visiting research fellow at RMIT currently under the mentorship of  Associate Professor Heather Horst (whose work I have also written about here).

I’m very excited about this, especially after reading Abidin’s work on Singaporean blogshops this morning. The paper discusses Abidin’s research practice while looking into the online and offline behaviours of an interesting community. What pricks up my ears is what she says about the way she was able to achieve insight:

In order to access and be socialised into the blog community, I had to ‘live’ within their shared social space and ‘perform’ as they would. This included adopting communication and behavioral norms just as any anthropologist entering a physical field site would. Conversations with readers and customers during my pre-field preparation informed my ‘performance’ as a participating ‘insider’. These included a repertoire of cyber lingo and localised blogosphere jargon, as well as an extensive background knowledge and social context of the local commercial blog scene. (8)

Through this precursor, I too have adopted behaviours I’ve observed as normative in the community I’m studying- particularly in relation to hashtag use, emoji selection and text posts. I love the idea of entering into a ‘physical site’ and adopting the behaviours of a tribe which seem foreign at first. My thesis uses Mary Douglas’s anthropological notion of Purity and Danger to interrogate the hashtags thinspiration, fitspiration and clean eating. Douglas’s theory is the result of many years fieldwork in primitive tribes of the Belgian Congo circa the 50s and 60s. I like to imagine myself doing similar sort of fieldwork with foreign groups of the future- teenage girls.

Abidin actually did create a Facebook presence to interact with her chosen community as part of her dissertation.

Since commercial bloggers convey their personas and interact with others through social media accounts such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Formspring, and Foursquare, these platforms become the ‘objects’ through which they ‘think with’ and exist in their digital community. In a bid to embed myself into the commercial blog community, I set up a new Facebook account to interact with fellow community members and a blog to host the more intimate insights into my life. On this Facebook account, I ‘added’ informants as ‘friends’ and subscribed to their Fan Pages for live feeds. I shaped the blog as a chronicle of my research journey and experiences as a graduate student so that informants could keep up-to-date with the progress of my research and keep in touch through a medium less formal than email correspondence. (9)

It’s always exciting to find someone who speaks your language! Looking forward to meeting her at the masterclass.

Work cited

Abidin, Crystal. “‘Cya IRL’: Researching digital communities online and offline.” Limina Journal of Historical and Cultural Studies (2013): 1-17. Print.

Constructing selves online // reading reflection

I love reading danah boyd (lower case intentional) because her focus is on debunking ideas of technology radically reshaping the human experience. Like Horst and Miller she argues that people remain the same, the tools the have to perform and represent identity are just different.

I recalled speaking to a teen named Stan whom I’d met in Iowa three years earlier. He had told me to stop looking for differences. “You’d actually be surprised how little things change. I’m guessing a lot of the drama is still the same, it’s just the format is a little different. It’s just changing the font and changing the background color really.” He made references to technology to remind me that technology wasn’t changing anything important. (3)

If I have learned one thing from my research, it’s this: social media services like Facebook and Twitter are providing teens with new opportunities to participate in public life, and this, more than anything else, is what concerns many anxious adults (10)

This is really relevant to my precursor for the same reasons I wrote about in my Horst and Miller reflection. I came at this project with a sense of alarmist horror at the radically changed ways young girls were interacting on digital spaces but have now arrived at a conclusion that the behaviours are not anything new, however the tools to share them are.

I also quite like boyd’s discussion of identity formation in avatars.

Choosing and designing an avatar is a central part of participation in immersive games and virtual worlds, but youth approach this practice in extraordinarily varied ways. Some teens purposefully construct their avatars in ways that they feel reflect their physical bodies; other teens choose characters based on skills or aesthetics. For some teens, being “in world” is discrete from their school environment, whereas others game with classmates. It may seem that the roleplaying elements of these environments imply a significant separation between the virtual and the real; however, these often get blurred in fantasy game worlds as well. 42

Her thoughts remind me alot of Caroline Humphrey’s discussion of avatar use in Russian chat rooms of all places.

[Avatars] should convey the inner state of the person, his soul, one might say, or the condition of his soul . Ordinary life is a suppression of the true inner being of a person, which lies deep in the soul and which is both profound and expressive.

(Miller 150, citing Humphrey 2009 40-41)

A nice little bridge between two readings I found marvellous. I’m thinking about my own construction of an avatar and what kind of choices I have made for her. I think the honesty of the Tumblr posts are an example of using an avatar to convey the condition of one’s soul, and the use of the ensuing instagram pictures is also quite revealing of my inner thoughts at the time. I think also though, avatars are often used as consolation for something, compensation for that which is missing in inner life.

Works cited

boyd, danah. It’s Complicated : The Social Lives of Networked Teens. Yale University Press, 2014. Print. (lower case on purpose for surname)

Humphrey, Caroline. “The Mask and the Face: Imagination and Social Life in Russian Chat Rooms and Beyond.” Ethnos 74.1 (2009): 31-50. Print.

Miller, Daniel.  “Social Networking Sites”. Digital Anthropology. Ed. Heather Horst and Daniel Miller. English ed. London: Berg, 2012. 150. Print.

Digital Anthropology and what makes us human these days // reading reflection

In recent years, critics of Anthropology have claimed it is a dying practice, such is the lightning speed trajectory of cultural change afforded by an expanded array of digital cultural artefacts for humans to perform and represent identity. However, Horst and Miller contend the faster cultural change happens, “the more relevant anthropological perspectives become because there is absolutely no sign that changes in technology are outstripping the human capacity to regard things as normative” (108). They suggest that unlike other disciplines, anthropology is “well equipped to immerse itself in the process by which digital culture becomes normative culture, and to understand what it tells us about being human” (108). Far from being a threat to the well established, research methodology that is Antropology, “the lesson of the digital is that, far from making us obsolete, the story that is anthropology has barely begun”(“Normativity and the Principle of Materiality” 108).

Horst and Miller later edited Digital Anthropology, a ground breaking manifesto taking anthropological practices into the digital age. The text shows an apparent wish to legitimise Anthropology as modern method of research which isn’t going away too soon, with the chops to be responsive to speedy trajectories of social change. Far from being a threat to authentic social relations, the digital is seen as a powerful way of   “reflecting upon what it means to be human, the ultimate task of the anthropology discipline” (Digital Anthropology 3).

Horst and Miller conclude:

Being human is a cultural and normative concept. We may employ technologies to shape our conceptualisation of what it means to be human, but it is our definition of being human that mediates what the technology is, not the other way around. (“Normativity and the Principle of Materiality” 108)

In light of these thoughts, I guess this precursor investigates the way young women use digital artefacts such as Instagram and Tumblr to represent the human experience. The artefacts are new, but the process behind their use is very much the same as the way human’s have behaved and interacted for centuries. This is why something I wrote in 2003 can be repackaged in a new way, yet still retain the emotion behind its original writing.

Works cited

Horst, Heather, and Daniel Miller. “Normativity and the Principle of Materiality: A View from Digital Anthropology.” Media International Australia 145 (2012): 103-11. Print.

Horst, Heather, and Daniel Miller. “The Digital and The Human.” Digital Anthropology. Ed. Heather Horst and Daniel Miller. English ed. London: Berg, 2012. 3-13. Print.

Belle Gibson and credibility in clean eating

Had an interesting thought today while thinking about paleo in relation to clean eating (which I’ll explore in my thesis). Belle Gibson was recently exposed as a fraud having faked terminal cancer to build a reputation as a health guru and make tonnes of money at the expense of people’s hopes and dreams of getting better. It’s pretty obvious I find her actions personally abhorrent. I was thinking though how easily credibility is gained inside social networks by people who have none whatsoever, simply because they are in possession of savvy knowledge of the right hashtags and posts.

When I’m looking at who the influencers are in the wellness blogging field, people are often credible for aesthetic reasons ie. they are in possession of washboard abs, defined collarbones, bikram yoga membership in exchange for publicity and tanned skin. These qualities and not a degree or professional experience in the field are what count as credibility these days.

Perhaps this reveals something about why people are engaging with my own fake online presence?

 

Reading Reflection: Clay Shirky and pro-ana

In Here Comes Everybody Clay Shirky demonstrates the ways in which social media enables groups to form without social approval. This is an extremely pertinent text for a study of pro-ana, which sees girls whose eating disordered behaviours are rejected by society as dangerously unhealthy, finding identity and belonging in relationships with each other online. Pro-ana has a formidable online presence, with established blogs and forums alongside very specific manifestos and mission statements on what it is to be ‘ana’/’mia’ etc.

Some choice quotes

Something is different, it is easier for groups to form without social approval. 205

The enormous visibility and searchability of social life means that the ability for the like-minded to locate one another, and to assemble and cooperate with one another, now exists independently of social approval or disapproval. The gathering of Pro-Ana girls isn’t a side effect of our social tools, it’s an effect of those tools. 207

The logic of self help is affirmational- a small group bands together to defend its values against internal and external  challenges…. The basic mechanism of mutual support remains the same. 207

Work cited

Shirky, Clay. Here Comes Everybody : The Power of Organizing without Organizations. New York: Penguin Press, 2008. Print.