via The Knowledge Network [with thanks to Katrien Pype for the tip-off]
Are mobile phones the modern equivalent of Jack’s magic beans, bringing health, wealth and happiness wherever they are scattered? Recent studies might make you think so. According to a 2005 paper by economist Leonard Waverman and colleagues at the London Business School, each 10 per cent increase in mobile phone ownership in developing countries produces an additional 0.6 per cent of growth in gross domestic product per person. Similarly encouraging figures featured in a more recent Harvard case study on Indian fishermen, which showed how the fishermen increased their profits by around 8 per cent by using mobile phones to call coastal markets from their boats.
These and other studies suggest that mobiles can revolutionise the way subsistence farmers and nomadic tribesmen trade crops and livestock. It’s fabulous PR for mobile-phone companies, which see developing countries as offering millions of new subscribers. But how realistic is the idea that mobile phones are an absolute good for the developing world?
In recent years millions of ordinary people in the global North have joined in the explosive growth of social media. These can be described as user-driven Web media where people create, mix and share all manner of digital contents. Although the interdisciplinary literature on social media is currently bourgeoning (see Boyd and Ellison 2007, Ellison et al 2009, Gilbert et al 2008, Ryan 2008), one relatively neglected area is the uses of social media for advocacy, campaigning and activism. Recent examples that have attracted the attention of the news media include the use of blogs and mobile devices in Barak Obama’s presidential campaign (Graff 2007), the reliance on Twitter by pro-democracy campaigners in Iran, and the creation of a powerful ‘cyberpolice’ force in China and its impact on the Chinese blogosphere. Yet despite the ample news media coverage of these developments, social media activism remains a poorly understood phenomenon (Turnšek and Jankowski 2008).
There is a growing anthropological corpus on Internet politics and activism that has prepared the ground for the study of social media activism – a form of social/political activism that increasingly relies on new social media technologies (e.g. Facebook, Orkut, Twitter, Delicious, Amazee, Flickr, Scribd, Google Docs, YouTube) for its recruitment, organisation, campaigning and self-identity. Anthropologists are well placed to investigate these trends, having previously researched the entanglements of Internet technologies with diverse political processes and/or social movements around the globe, including indigenous cyberactivism (Landzelius 2006), local e-governance (Hinkelbein 2008, Postill 2008, Strauss 2007), ethno-religious war (Bräuchler 2005), anti-globalisation activism (Juris 2008), hacker activism (Coleman and Golub 2008) and the free software movement (Kelty 2008).
Un relato de ciencia ficción
Me llamo Benjamín Senet y así nació mi ciencia. Nació en la Universidad Complutense de Madrid, en la Facultad de Periodismo, para ser exactos. Hace ya bastantes anyos de esto (perdonad que lo ponga con enye y que no gaste acentos, es por el teclado y tal). Vi el panorama y me asuste: interminables partidas de mus en el bar, tabaquismo cronico, salas de conferencias rebosantes, cinco anyos de carrera, 250% de paro juvenil.
Asi que me puse a estudiar indonesio con intencion de buscarme la vida en otros lugares. (Habia pensado en estudiar swahili, pero el director del Colegio Nuestra Senyora de las Misiones me aseguro que las perspectivas economicas prometian mas en el Extremo Oriente que en Africa Oriental). Mi profesor de indonesio, un simpatico empleado de la embajada llamado Sudirman, me puso en contacto con un compatriota suyo, Yusuf Said, al que habia conocido en los EE.UU. y que ahora trabajaba de periodista en la revista Tempus de Yakarta. Al poco tiempo llego una carta de Said invitandome a hacer practicas de trabajo (praktek kerja) en Tempus. Con esta carta me fui a la agencia de noticias EFA, en la calle Escarceda, donde me facilitaron un carnet de stringer en Indonesia.
No farde yo poco en el bar de la facultad con mi carnet de corresponsal de la EFA. “Cuando te vas?” pregunto alguien. “Este es un enchufado fijo” musito otro (o a lo mejor dijo “pijo”, ahora que lo pienso).
Por su parte, mi viejo amigo Juan Pinyas (del que hace anyos que no se nada, por cierto) me dijo: “Joder Senet, vaya par de huevos que le echas. Irte a Indochina asi, sin mas”. Yo le conteste, sin pensarmelo dos veces: “No, los que teneis huevos sois vosotros, por quedaros aqui”.
Pero tenia razon Pinyas, aquello era una locura.
To be continuado…
CALL FOR PAPERS
Special Issue of International Journal of Human-Computer Studies
Title: Locative Media and Communities
Guest Editors:
Katharine S. Willis (University of Siegen)
Keith Cheverst (University of Lancaster)
TOPIC
The development of locative media applications is not simply about the physical location or social setting in which the interaction occurs, but rather about situating the media within the social setting of a community. This Special Issue will explore the potential for locative media applications to support community cohesion and the integration of such media within existing community structures and practices. The workshop will address the dual challenge of capturing the temporary and spatially changeful nature of behaviours with locative media, as well as responding to the intricate web of strong and weak social ties that make up local social networks, in order to find ways to support community practices. In terms of methodology it will focus on the potential of ethnographic approaches for investigating and evaluating the integration of media in these social settings. This special issue aims to present a set of high-quality and original research outcomes. We hope to receive submissions that offer insights into appropriate methodologies for identifying requirements, evaluating behaviour and integrating locative media in real-world communities. We invite contributions that respond to some of the following questions:
• How can mobile media be located within existing communities and social settings?
• How can we find better ways of enabling and supporting locative media in
community practices?
• How can mobile media foster communities and facilitate daily living, such as for
communities in rural areas or the elderly?
• How can ethnographic methods inform and evaluate the place and integration of
media in community settings?
The first in a series of posts on social media in South America by Raquel Recuero for DMLcentral.net, University of California Humanities Research Institute.
To start my participation here in DMLcentral, I want to write about social media outside the U.S., specifically in South America. Let’s take the case of Orkut in Brazil, an interesting and relatively-unknown subject that I’ve researched and followed closely for years. Orkut is very much a cultural phenomenon in Brazil. Although Brazilians had experience with other social networking sites (Fotolog, for example, was very popular among young Brazilians in 2003 and 2004, before Orkut appeared), Orkut caused a revolution in Internet access in Brazil. As Orkut grew quickly in Brazil starting in 2004, it became synonymous with the Internet. Being on the Internet meant being on Orkut. The question of course is, why?
According to data recently released by Ibope/NetRatings (all links in Portuguese), 73% of all Brazilian Internet users are also Orkut users. Orkut is also rated as the third most accessed Internet domain in Brazil. Because of numbers like these, some researchers even argue that Orkut played a fundamental role in popularizing the Internet in Brazil. Many people in Brazil have learned how to use the Internet out of a desire to access Orkut and, among youth, it is commonly said that, “If you are not in Orkut, you don’t exist.”
What is it about Orkut that has attracted so many young Brazilians? How do Brazilians use Orkut? What are the implications of this growth? In my first series of posts, I’ll explore the Orkut phenomena in Brazil, including some of the explanations for, and the implications of, Orkut’s growth. First, Orkut’s appropriations and effects.
A few loose thoughts on how existing anthropological scholarship on the Internet and related phenomena may be recruited to the study of social media activism:
* Around the turn of the millennium a number of anthropological and ethnographic studies of the Internet appeared (e.g. Hakken 1999, Hine 2000, Jankowski 2000, Miller and Slater 2000, see also Postill in press). They were part of a wider societal and scholarly shift in affluent countries towards the normalisation of the Internet away from earlier, hyped-up notions of a futuristic ‘cyberspace’ (see an account of this in Wellman and Haythornthwaite 2003). If in the 1980s and 1990s authors spoke of cyberspace as being apart from everyday life offline, now in the 2000s Internet ethnographers and others increasingly began to write about the Internet as a part of daily life (Miller and Slater 2000). For most of us in the global North the Internet has become quite ordinary, as taken for granted a network as the transport networks and electricity grids.
* Over the past 10 years or so, anthropologists have studied a range of Internet-related topics, including telework, online religion, nation-building, ethnic conflict, free software, virtual materiality, digital fan films, the digital divide, and Internet activism (see Postill in press).
* Within the anthropological study of Internet activism we can distinguish studies that have looked at indigenous activism (Budka forthcoming), anti-globalisation activism (Juris 2008) and local-level activism (Postill 2008). However, to the best of my knowledge little anthropological work has gone to date into the study of social media (blogs, social bookmarking, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, YouTube, etc.) – including for purposes of activism. If Debra Spitulnik found in 1993 that there was still no anthropology of mass media to speak of, I suspect that today (in 2009) we can say that there is still no ’social media anthropology’ (other than as a recent coinage used in the field of social media consultancy).
* Little is known, even in other disciplines, about social media activism, i.e. those forms of social and political activism that rely heavily on social media technologies for their growth and maintenance. What could an anthropological approach contribute to the study of this emerging phenomenon? Some suggestions (I am adapting here a trichotomy taken from Kelty 2008):
- Methodologically – not only an ethnographic and sensory approach (Pink 2009) to social media practices but also historical research on social media activism (activists’ life histories, biographies of social media artefacts, online archives, see Kelty 2008, Postill 2009).
- Theoretically – (a) a long social anthropological tradition of grappling with forms of sociality and sociation in ways that don’t reduce the flux and complexity of social life to vague emic ideas of ‘community’ or ‘network’ (Amit 2002, Postill 2008); this is particularly important in the case of contemporary activism with its almost fetishisation of the idea of ‘networks’ as loose, non-hierarchical, futuristic social formations (Riles 2000, Juris 2008, Amit 2007); (b) a more recent turn to the theory of practice among media anthropologists (Braeuchler and Postill in press) – this can help to explore and develop a working notion of ’social media practices’ in the context of social and political activism.
- Empirically – the combination of a diachronic + synchronic research methodology and theoretical sophistication just mentioned would enable anthropologists working on social media activism to study the regularities and contingencies of activists’ struggles to pursue agendas of social and political reform amidst a rapidly changing social media landscape.
References
For most references, see Postill, J. (in press, due early 2010) ’Researching the Internet’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute. Draft version available here.
I’ve been putting together with colleagues a set of Web resources around the theme “Mobile Livelihoods”, i.e. on the new economic opportunities afforded by mobile technologies, particularly in poor countries - see (and add to) delicious tag MobLiv, http://delicious.com/jpostill/MobLiv
This presentation by Laura Forlano (Cornell), to be delivered in New York tomorrow, looks highly pertinent. Anyone else out there working on mobile livelihoods?
