[ecrea] AAA Panel on Social Media & Anthropology

Jordan Kraemer ((jkraemer /at/ uci.edu)<mailto:(jkraemer /at/ uci.edu)>) and Charles Pearson
((charles.a.pearson /at/ gmail.com)<mailto:(charles.a.pearson /at/ gmail.com)>) are
organizing this panel for the American Anthropological Association annual
meeting this fall (11/14-11/18 in San Francisco). Please contact one of them
if you are interested. Thanks!

Abstract:

Towards an Anthropology of Social Media

By the end of 2012, Facebook stands to have one billion global users, while
two hundred million tweets (Twitter posts) are sent daily and YouTube users
upload 60 hours of video each minute. Alongside these well-known online
platforms, numerous smaller ones attract users in different regions across the
globe and in many languages (such as RenRen in China or Orkut in Brazil).
So-called "social media" are emerging as an ubiquitous facet of everyday life
for both anthropologists and people with whom we work. In contrast to this
diversity of users and practices, however, popular discourse often portrays
social media in binary terms. While some accounts warn that emergent media
will further social isolation, others frame social media in terms of
celebratory cyber-utopianism. In such enthusiastic narratives, social media
provide a universally democratizing space for communication, offering users
new means for civic participation while collapsing distinctions between
producer and con
 sumer or local and global. Indeed, social media have even been heralded for
eradicating modes of alienation.



Anthropologists are uniquely positioned to study the particularities of
emerging media platforms and practices in global and transnational contexts.
Yet an anthropology of social media must contend with the challenges of
studying rapidly transforming global communication networks and social
practices. On one hand, since users may be radically distributed and
place-ness may be difficult to locate or identify, how can we rethink single-
and multi-sited methods to address the spatial dimensions of social media
practices? On the other, what are the increasingly informational aspects of
new modes of expression and circulation? This panel will address the
specificities and particularities of social media and emerging modes of
production. Whose sociality do social media represent, articulate, or
facilitate? How are certain forms of connectivity and interactivity
privileged, and under what circumstances? In short, what are the concerns and
possibilities for an emerging anthropology of social media?

_______________
Alice E. Marwick, Ph.D.
Postdoctoral Researcher
Microsoft Research New England
Desk: 857.453.6330
Cell: 206.650.9109
(amarwick /at/ microsoft.com)



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