[ecrea] "New Media, New Publics?" Current Anthropology, Jan 2017

New Media, New Publics? An Introduction to Supplement 15
Charles Hirschkind, Maria José A. de Abreu, and Carlo Caduff
Current Anthropology, 24 Jan 2017

In this special issue, we examine how publics are brought into being
through historically specific media practices. We treat the question of new
media as an invitation to explore changing conditions of communication
across a number of ethnographic locations. We argue that these changing
conditions have challenged our capacity to understand the nature of
publics. It is important to emphasize that none of the contributors
perceives new media as a coherent object of attention that can easily be
isolated as an entity; nor do the contributors locate its novelty in its
digital format. Instead, they examine modes of mediation that entail the
technological but are not reducible to it. This approach allows
anthropologists to keep the referent of new media open and remain attentive
to emerging forms of public life that are working outside of or adjacent to
the logics of both the digital and the technological. Our hope is that this
collection of essays contributes to an anthropological understanding of
media that illuminates important aspects of the political economic present,
attends to the erosion and reanimation of anonymity in public life, and
captures dynamics of staging, projection, and response within and across
ethnographic sites.

http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/688903


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