Digital Anthropology

Der hier vorliegende ethnographische Text untersucht negative soziale Dynamiken, die durch die Nutzung sozialer Medien entstehen können. Das empirische Material basiert auf Feldforschungen, die zwischen 2013 und 2015 sowohl online als auch offline durchgeführt wurden. Bei dem Fallbeispiel handelt es sich um einen kommunalpolitischen Wahlkampf in der südostspanischen Stadt Murcia. Im Fokus stehen parteiinterne Diskussionen innerhalb eines linksgerichteten Bündnisses, die zu einem großen Teil in der Quasi-Öffentlichkeit sozialer Medien ausgetragen wurden. Einstiegspunkt in den Text bildet eine spezifische Vorannahme, die von den Aktivisten und Aktivistinnen im Vorfeld der Kommunalwahl geteilt wurde. Die beforschten Akteure gingen davon aus, dass die Art von Öffentlichkeit, die soziale Medien für sie generierten, ihnen dabei helfen würde, einen erfolgreichen populistischen Wahlkampf zu führen. Konträr zu dieser kulturoptimistischen Perspektive auf Technologie arbeitet der Text einen Widerspruch heraus, der den Wahlkämpfer*innen selbst verborgen blieb: Er bestand zwischen dem Ideal der demokratischen Gemeinschaftsform, das sie in ihrem Bündnis umzusetzen suchten, und der kommerziellen Logik jenes digitalen Mediums, dessen sie sich in ihrem aktivistischen Alltag hierfür bevorzugt bedienten: Facebook. Dessen Fragmentierung und Algorithmisierung wirkten in dem hier untersuchten Sample als Amplifikatoren bestehender sozialer Beziehungen. Zwar verstärkte das soziale Medium in einigen Fällen das Gefühl von Zusammengehörigkeit, größtenteils entfaltete es aber destruktive Dynamiken. Als „Egomedium“ war es nicht nur maßgeblich mit dafür verantwortlich, dass die Wahlkampfstrategie ins Stocken geriet, sondern auch dafür, dass das kommunale Wahlbündnis am Ende zerbrach. Aus der hier vorgestellten, kulturanthropologischen Analyse ergibt sich nicht zuletzt ein gleichermaßen demokratietheoretisches wie medienpolitisches Argument. Ein global operierendes Technologieunternehmen wie Facebook trägt auch eine Verantwortung für jene Formen von Mikro-Öffentlichkeiten, die seine Software – quasi als Nebenprodukt – in unzähligen lokalen Kontexten erzeugt.

When we talk about digital, virtual, and online worlds who and what are we referencing? What happens to conceptions of the human, culture, bodies, politics, art, and life itself when filtered through binary codes? Have we always already been digital to some extent? While digital worlds can be celebrated for their potential to bring newness into the world, these spaces are fraught, full of complexities that leave some people out. Rather than thinking about the digital solely from the terms of computer science, policy, engineering or other classic ways of approaching it, in this class we will think of the digital through its cultural, artistic, and human-centered manifestations. This course will explore how anthropology opens up new modes of understanding digital technologies and social media. Rather than seeing new media and technological innovations as objects that have shifted the course of human history, how might we temper our digital enthusiasm to consider what old questions are given new life in a digital frame? From Facebook activism to Second Life Video Games to the image of the cyborg, we will travel through digital worlds together in order to examine the rich cultural, political, economic, and ethical questions opened up by a renewed interest in digital worlds. Beyond reading about, theorizing, and discussing digital media, students will also get firsthand experience in conducting digital anthropological research. This class is designed for students to get an introduction into digital anthropology. Thus, no real requirements are necessary. However, having taken an introduction to cultural anthropology course would be useful, though not necessary.

I commend Campbell for her research about social media. It is vital that the religious academy takes time and care to explore this topic. I agree that negative memes about other faiths can be harmful and should be addressed. In my response, I will discuss how memes operate based on folkloric and anthropological research. A key part of my argument is that we need to revisit rhetoric in order to both understand memes and effectively address anti-religious sentiment expressed through that medium. I will end my chapter with recommended action steps for the church today.

This paper offers preliminary arguments for a decolonial critique of vitriol and disinformation circulating on online media-a phenomenon that has raised moral panic among liberal minded critics. The decolonial critique developed here probes the roots of this moral panic and considers the limits of analysis arising out of such a panic. Rather than viewing this moral panic as an expected reaction to a crisis produced by digital communication, I emphasize the need for historical sensibility and argue that information disorder and hate speech are part of the global process of racialized colonialism that is now increasingly perpetuated through the affective infrastructures of the digital.

This is an original model of Collaborative Digital Autoethnography called #kachinlifestories that focused on life stories of Kachin people across the world originating from Myanmar, China and India. #kachinlifestories was supported by a large KAKENHI Young Scientist Category “A” multi-year grant at JPY 23.5 million in the field of Cultural Anthropology awarded by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (2011-2016). #kachinlifestories is essentially a crowd generated, living digital autoethnographic narrative “database”, or as I prefer, a collaborative digital autoethnographic ecology where ordinary Kachin people share snippets of their life stories through their individual volitions conglomerating into a larger collage of being through the hashtag #kachinlifestories on major social media network systems. This is an original and disruptive social scientific innovation. This project has been on-going since 2009, with the hashtag regularly active since Dec 2012.

This work identifies transgender oriented image memes as a dataset that reflects transgender lived experience, minority stress, and resilience. In this analysis of transgender memes, four themes were identified: Community, Bodies, Transgender Experience, and The Broken System of Gender. Memes about bodies dealt not only with medical transition, but discussed the distinction between euphoria and dysphoria, as well as cisgender expectations of transgender bodies and bodily narratives. Memes about community included depictions and acts of validation, discussions of reclamations of power, and the queering of media to form senses of community representation. Transgender experience memes discussed the ways being transgender tints otherwise common experiences, such as interfacing with family, or coming into one’s identity. Finally, the ways gender, as a social system, limit people and reinforce harmful hegemonic tendencies are discussed. Importantly, these memes demonstrated each element o...

Ορφανίδης, Γ. (2021). Στο: Ε. Κανταρτζή, Γ. Παπαδημητρίου, Χ. Κωσταρής (Επιμ.). Πρακτικά 5ου Πανελλήνιου Συνεδρίου «Εκπαίδευση στον 21ο αιώνα: Ανάπτυξη της κριτικής σκέψης, της δημιουργικότητας και της καινοτομίας» (Τόμος Δ΄) (Αθήνα, 25-27 Σεπτεμβρίου 2020). Αθήνα: ΕΚΕΔΙΣΥ - Υπουργείο Παιδείας και Θρησκευμάτων, 131-136.

http://ekedisyconference.weebly.com.

Digital Cultural Anthropology: An Innovative Educational Practice for Secondary Education.

Singapore is demographically, and thus linguistically, diverse. English has been coming into play as lingua franca since independence. Still, forms of English in Singapore is polarised into Standard English and Singlish and is politicized. In the state's perspective, Singlish is corrupted, ungrammatical and bad English which is an unwanted burden. On the other hand, many Singaporeans see it as a unique national identity. In the media scene, English is highly controlled. It is thus an everyday situation in English local mass media that the host talks in posh British or American accent, and the interviewee or the one who phone in will speaks in Singaporean accent, or even Singlish. Nonetheless, after the use of the internet is widespread and digital technology are well introduced in Singapore, anyone can become a media creator and broadcast online to public audiences. This anthropological research aims to study the lively and ubiquitous use of Singlish in YouTube comedy sketch channels, such as Wah!Banana, Jian-hao Tan, NightOwlCinematics, MunahHirziOfficial, Ministry of Funny, and so on, to see how it unveils the relationship of Singaporeans and their colloquial language. Proposed by linguistic anthropologist Micheal Herzfeld (1997), "cultural intimacy" aims to understand complex mundane cultural practice where social identities are constituted together with nationalism rhetoric and existence of the nation-state, manipulation of marginality, including social poetics. These link individuals to collectivity under statehood. This framework illuminates how some cultural identities may evoke "insiders" feel embarrassed to outsiders which meanwhile ensure them the members of the community with the same social identities. Following Herzfeld's framework and studying through YouTube production nexus in Singapore, I propose that there are ambivalent ideologies on Singlish both by government and civilians, which sustains the existence of the language. In addition, I seek to understand how YouTube's media affordance and Singaporean's language ideologies mesh together under the Singaporean context.

This poster shares insight from the past two semesters of teaching ANT 101: Human Nature/Human Culture, a gen-ed course that introduces the holistic discipline of Anthropology and fulfills the Self and Society requirement. Students engage in class participation through a closed WordPress blog and a course Twitter hashtag, #ANT101UWL. These digital components enable students to connect key anthropological concepts to their own real-world experiences, share ideas in real-time during lecture and discussion, and develop skills for responsible use of social media. Students generate original content, search for reliable educational sources online, share their findings, and comment on peers’ posts. Student-generated content is directly integrated in class lectures, fostering dialogue in a large class setting, rewarding successful achievement of learning outcomes, and promoting a student-centered approach to learning. Anthropologists today conduct fieldwork and research in online communities in addition to traditional venues, and they promote cultural awareness to the general public using social media like blogging and twitter. In #ANT101UWL students participate in digital anthropology by contributing personal insight to their online anthropology learning community and sharing their experiences with digital followers outside of the classroom.

Nhân học số là một khái niệm khá mới mẻ trong lĩnh vực khoa học nhân văn. Thuật ngữ này mới xuất hiện trong khoảng hơn một thập kỉ vừa qua khi con người bắt đầu bước vào kỉ nguyên của cách mạng công nghiệp  4.0. Thời đại kỹ thuật số gián đoạn, như Hine (2015) chỉ ra, về cơ bản là một hiện tượng đại chúng “được nhúng, thể hiện và thường nhật”. Theo Hine (2015, chương 2),  đối với nhiều người trên thế giới, Internet là một phần không thể thiếu trong cuộc sống hằng ngày của chúng ta và/hoặc một phần tích hợp của bối cảnh sống; được “cắm sâu vào” không còn là một nỗ lực siêu việt mà là “một sự mở rộng của những cách hiện hữu và hành động khác trên thế giới” (loc 880); và kết quả là, chúng ta sử dụng Internet và mảng thiết bị kỹ thuật số liên quan của nó (Internet of Things) theo kiểu bình thường, không nổi bật. Các công cụ kỹ thuật số đã tạo ra những nội dung nhân học được số hóa với một dung lượng tưởng chừng như vô tận. Chính sự phong phú về nội dung trong cuộc sống con người ngày càng được  số hóa nhiều hơn, giàu hơn, phong phú hơn  đã  thúc đẩy công nghệ đám mây để lưu trữ nguồn  dữ liệu  tưởng  như  vô tận  này. Trên  toàn cầu các  ứng  dụng lớn như Youtube, Facebook /Zalo, Twitter là nền tảng để thể hiện tất cả các sản phẩm được số hóa bao gồm: ảnh quét, ghi âm tiếng nói, phim video, v.v. sang số hóa. Và quan trọng nhất là những sản phẩm này thông qua các nền tảng gần như là miễn phí đến với tất cả cộng đồng trong không khí chia sẻ, giao lưu và đối thoại.

This dissertation investigates human-robot encounters and how robot existence here is calibrated to the social lives of humans. Based on a year of fieldwork in two laboratories dedicated to the development of human-robot interaction in the Kansai region of Japan, this dissertation follows professor Hiroshi Ishiguro, his associates, and the humanoid beings that populate the two laboratories, Intelligent Robotics Laboratories and Hiroshi Ishiguro Laboratories. From within the walls of these laboratories, I investigate how the roboticists strive to make robots with systemic and affective capacity for relating to humans.
I approach the laboratories as a specific community that calibrates the social through technical means and through staged and choreographed encounters between humanoids and humans. In these calibrations, the roboticists standardize and attune the humans and robots to each other through patterns of communication, linear algorithms, material affordances and limitations, dynamics and speed of movement. Equally, the roboticists apply models of human behaviour, and repertories of cultural expressions. The calibration of the robots’ social existence involves a search for social and communicative standards that both robots and humans can partake in. But such calibrations are not harmonious, and this work goes beyond the machinic and ordered regimes of calculation. Through their work, the roboticists themselves are affected by the on-going intimate tinkering and calibration of their robots. The robots are unruly, ambiguous, spectacular beings that provoke strong reactions of intimacy, care, recognition and affective uncertainty. Such tensions create affective relations that rouse sensations of excitement, alienation or confusion and render the robots open for conflicting interpretation and meanings. 
In the staging of the encounters between humans and robots, the roboticists try to frame these tensions in productive ways through performative expression that juxtaposes conventional understanding of human sociality, with technical capabilities, and the promise of the innovatively new.

In this blog post, I attempt to define the feelings that impress binary gender expectations in place with the concept of hetero-comfortability from my ongoing ethnographic work in VRChat. Hetero-comfortability is a process of recognition, where feelings of familiarity — historically established through hetero-conditioning — create impressions that allow one to find comfort in the continuing appearance of hetero-signifiers. As Sara Ahmed (2004b) notes, “To follow the rules of heterosexuality is to be at ease in a world that reflects back the couple form one inhabits as an ideal.”

Abadan is an oil city in southwest Iran, which underwent significant physical and symbolic destruction during the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s. However one attempts to understand the history of this city and its various communities (past and present), images and nostalgia are clear entry points. Whilst images were the stuff upon which much of the city's characteristic, cosmopolitan identity was built over the course of the twentieth century, nostalgia shapes a great deal of how it has been/is evoked today.

This paper examines the role played by social media in developing Abadan’s contemporary identity. In particular, digital photographs are shown to play a significant part in keeping the ‘idea’ of Abadan alive, on- and offline, while also moving forms of re-engagement with the city beyond nostalgia. Based on digital-ethnographic and archival research carried out on- and offline, and interviews with former and current Abadani residents, the paper illustrates how digital practices of (re-)engaging make an active contribution to an ever-changing sense of Abadan as was, as is, and as could be. In so doing, the study contributes anthropological insights into the evolving relationship between photography, digital culture and collective memory/identity.

Also available online at: http://www.abadan.wiki/en/abadans-digital-afterlife-past-images-and-present-pasts-in-abadani-virtual-communities/

and In Persian: http://www.abadan.wiki/fa/705-2/

Departing from a body of artworks by Contemporary Argentinean artists, I raised questions related to the contemporary human condition embedded in digital life: psychopathologies, the cancellation of dead time, the characteristics of the new subjectivity, the de-activation of the potency of the body. From the understanding of this big and complex panorama, I embedded myself in media theory, sociology and philosophy, to contextualise how algorithmic culture affect the global subject. Moreover, I have also tried to think of the differences in which the global and the local intersect along this paradigm, setting some hypotheses which I am working now in the second part of this investigation. In "Lightening the Existential Vacuum", my analysis about the artists’ works highlighted the potency of the body in the Internet Era, and speculated around local differences between Latin American, Central Europe and the U.S.

This paper was presented as my dissertation at Goldsmiths, University of London (Sept 2017) - MA Contemporary Art Theory

Online socialisation is ubiquitous in daily life. This socialisation has the potential to reproduce or challenge offline inequalities. Gender inequality is one facet of offline socialisation that is transferred online. Using the recent GamerGate phenomenon, this paper examines online gender inequality, harassment, and agency through a feminist lens. GamerGate emerged on- line through blogs, with social media such as twitter providing evidence that dominant, ag- gressive male privilege manifests online, while simultaneously providing women the space to exercise agency and collectively resist. This paper explores GamerGate in relation to wider gender inequality and harassment online as well as the importance of online social interac- tions for feminist activism and collective identity. GamerGate showcases male dominance on- line and the ways women employ feminism to collectively resist harassment and support each other in the face of inequality.
Keywords: Feminism, GamerGate, Digital Anthropology, Gender Inequality

This chapter explores the negotiations around knowledge production and forms of “knowing” in collaborative, distributed, and interdisciplinary projects that privilege ethnography as an epistemological and methodological approach to knowing. More specifically, it explores the relationships between “traditional” forms of knowing and knowledge production and the processes of “being in fieldwork” in contemporary anthropology’s complex and dynamic research environment that is increasingly mediated through digital technologies, spaces, places, and artefacts. Drawing upon my participation on three ethnographic collaborations over the past decade, I reflect upon a shift from personalized, private experiences of fieldwork, wherein the individual self is the primary instrument of knowing, to a de-centred self by which knowledge is constructed through different forms of interaction and mediated in and through digital interfaces and technology. I conclude with a brief discussion of the challenges of each mode of mediation and collaboration.

Practice-led-ReSearch exploring hitchhiker's relationship with the digital platforms: BlaBlaCar (www.blablacar.com), Hitchwiki (www.hitchwiki.org), Couch Surfing (www.couchsurfing.com), TrustRoots (www.trustroots.org) and HitchGathering (http://hitchgathering.org).

Tiktok, a quick, short and easy way to fame is nothing less than digital Darwinism, where one needs to keep at pace with emerging trends and innovations in the field of social media and digital marketing. As Darwin's basic theory focuses on reproducing better offsprings, Tiktok's better videos are the ones which are more funny, creative or both.

This dissertation argues that ‘PC Music’, a label, artistic collective, and genre world, animates musical relationships to time and the political philosophy of accelerationism, a theory that seeks to speed up in order to escape the processes of capitalism. With a transdisciplinary approach, which combines historical and ethnographic empirical data with theoretical abstraction (via queer theory), this thesis is the first critical cultural analysis of this contemporary popular-experimental label to establish that it purports to ‘aggress the present’. A wider genealogy of this Internet-mediated collective, and an analysis of the discourses it has generated, makes this contemporary-oriented temporal logic clearer, meanwhile ‘on the ground’ knowledge of the aesthetics the label nurtures is provided through an ethnography of a virtual festival hosted by the label in 2020. From the performances of queer and queer of colour artists at this event, which I take to be at odds with the present-centred discourse of the label, my analyses draw out the queer temporalities actualised by these performances.

Queer (of colour) artistic practices are analysed as a means of demonstrating (a) that queer relations to time and temporality escape the normative directions of time’s arrow in such a way that musically energises a queer critique of accelerationism and (b) that such a line of escape demonstrates that the queer artistic practices at this event do not just ‘aggress the present’, but do so in a way that seeks to snap normative temporal trajectories. Queerness, as analysed here, engages a utopian politics that reimagines the coalescent possibilities of the future. Queering accelerationism and PC Music thus constitutes a wider critique of cisheteronormative time, where a plurality of temporalities and destinations entails an ethical obligation to queer (renavigate) time through cultural processes that are worth speeding up and intensifying.

In this chapter I compare the exchange of ceremonial shells in the contexts of the Kula ring in the Massim archipelago and of a special type of video called Tags inside the beauty community of YouTube. I analyse general correspondences of how value is created and transformed as these objects are produced and shared among participants. I argue that Tag videos share a particular similarity with Kula valuables: both have ceremonial rather than practical use. In order to support this analysis, I drew on Munn (1986) and on Graeber’s (2001) discussion of Munn’s theory of value to present key notions such as action, intersubjective spacetime and value transformation. I suggest that Munn’s model can be successfully applied to explain the motivation YouTube beauty gurus have for spending time and resources creating videos that do not display their knowledge about makeup. I also point out the particular correspondence between Munn’s Gawa and the YouTube beauty community regarding how action based on ritual exchange results in the formation of intersubjective relationships.

This special issue collects the confessions of five digital ethnographers laying bare their methodological failures, disciplinary posturing, and ethical dilemmas. The articles are meant to serve as a counseling stations for fellow researchers who are approaching digital media ethnographically. On the one hand, this issue’s contributors acknowledge the rich variety of methodological articulations reflected in the lexicon of “buzzword ethnography”. On the other, they evidence how doing ethnographic research about, on, and through digital media is most often a messy, personal, highly contextual enterprise fraught with anxieties and discomforts. Through the four “private messages from the field” collected in this issue, we acknowledge the messiness, open-endedness and coarseness of ethnographic research in-the-making. In order to do this, and as a precise editorial choice made in order to sidestep the lexical turf wars and branding exercises of ‘how to’ methodological literature, we propose to recuperate two forms of ethnographic writing: Confessional ethnography (Van Maanen 2011) and self-reflection about the dilemmas of ethnographic work (Fine 1993). Laying bare our fieldwork failures, confessing our troubling epistemological choices and sharing our ways of coping with these issues becomes a precious occasion to remind ourselves of how much digital media, and the ways of researching them, are constantly in the making.

It is commonly thought that ‘being there’ has been the sine qua non of anthropological research ever since Malinowski’s ‘fieldwork revolution’ in the early 20th century (Geertz 1988). Yet during World War Two, leading US-based anthropologists such as Mead, Bateson and Benedict had no choice but to study the cultures of Japan, Germany and other nations ‘at a distance’, including through media formats such as films, novels, and poetry (Mead and Metraux 2000). With the explosive growth of networked technologies in recent years, the remote study of social practices is once again on the agenda - only now with far greater media resources at our disposal than those available in the 1940s. In this chapter I reflect on my experience of researching digital politics while physically absent from ‘the field’. I argue that there is nothing inherently inferior or illegitimate about researching local issues remotely (e.g. via Twitter, live streaming, web cam, email, online archives), or indeed retroactively, especially for ethnographers with previous local experience. The main challenge is precisely how to overcome this misconception and make adequate provision for remote ethnography in our research designs and practices.

Social media platforms have quickly transformed communication, relationships, identities, education and power relations. These platforms have also become a popular topic for discussion and research, yet most claims made about social media are very general. This course takes an anthropological approach to social media in order to speak about the ways social media use is embedded in and reflective of specific cultural contexts. The course concentrates on content of social media rather than platforms, and also explores social media as a research method for understanding how people's lives converge in both online and offline spaces. We will consider the incredible variation in social media that emerges on different continents, among people of different class and religious backgrounds, for people with different gender and sexual identities, and among people who are differently embedded in global systems. Course Objectives Students will be able to: 1. explain key terms that are central to an anthropological understanding of social media 2. relate social media to topics of cultural and social diversity 3. relate issues in the study of social media with power relations, ideology, and social institutions 4. think comparatively in terms of both universals of social media as well as local inflections 5. apply anthropological methods to their own project 6. apply key themes, theories, and approaches of anthropology to their own analysis

This master's thesis tries to answer the research question “What is post-irony, and how does it manifest itself on social media?”. The study was conducted through fieldwork carried out on the visual- and auditory- social world of VRChat, using traditional anthropological methods and virtual reality hardware.

Η παρούσα πτυχιακή εργασία με θέμα τις στερεοτυπικές διαφημιστικές αναπαραστάσεις στα ελληνικά κοινωνικά μέσα εκπονήθηκε κατά το ακαδημαϊκό έτος 2019-2020. Με αφορμή το μάθημα “Κουλτούρα της φωτογραφίας” ασχολήθηκα με τη μελέτη της διαφημιστικής καμπάνιας της σοκολατοβιομηχανίας Lacta τον Φεβρουάριο του 2019 με θέμα “#ActforLove: Αγκάλιασε όλες τις γεύσεις της αγάπης”. Η καμπάνια αυτή είχε ως κεντρικό άξονα το συναίσθημα της αγάπης, φωτογραφήθηκαν ζευγάρια που κατά την κοινή γνώμη θεωρούνται «διαφορετικά» -σύμφωνα με την εταιρεία: δηλαδή ομοφυλόφιλοι, άτομα με πανκ/ροκ εμφάνιση, άτομα με τατουάζ, άτομα από διαφορετικές χώρες μεταξύ τους, βάση εξωτερικής εμφάνισης κ.ά.. Με την καμπάνια, η εταιρεία είχε ως στόχο την κατάδειξη ύπαρξης των κοινωνικών στερεοτύπων και πως θα πρέπει να καταρριφθούν. Η καμπάνια αποτελείται από φωτογραφικό υλικό των ζευγαριών, ολιγόλεπτες συνεντεύξεις των ίδιων καθώς και αφού υπήρξαν οι πρώτες αντιδράσεις και προσβλητικά σχόλια των χρηστών στα κοινωνικά δίκτυα της εταιρείας προς τις φωτογραφίες, η ίδια αποφάσισε την διεκπεραίωση ενός κοινωνικού "πειράματος" με σκοπό την καταγραφή των αντιδράσεων του κόσμου εκτός ψηφιακής συνθήκης. Η περίπτωση αυτή μου κέντρισε το ενδιαφέρον από την πρώτη στιγμή καθώς ναι μεν αναδεικνύεται το φαινόμενο των κοινωνικών στερεοτύπων κυρίως ως προς τον σεξουαλικό προσανατολισμό του ατόμου και η απόρριψη συγκεκριμένων κοινωνικών ομάδων, η οποία εκφράζεται μέσω κοινωνικών δικτύων, αλλά συγχρόνως δημιουργήθηκε τέτοιος σάλος στις σελίδες της εταιρείας στα κοινωνικά δίκτυα, ιδιαίτερα στη σελίδα της Λάκτα στο Facebook, με τις φωτογραφίες των ομοφυλόφιλων ζευγαριών, και θεώρησα χρήσιμη την ενασχόληση και την ανάλυση από ανθρωπολογική σκοπιά αυτών των ζητημάτων που θίγονται στη συγκεκριμένη διαφημιστική καμπάνια. Το σημαντικότερο στοιχείο αυτής της καμπάνιας είναι ότι αρχικά ασχολείται με ένα φλέγον ζήτημα, τα κοινωνικά στερεότυπα, η συζήτηση λαμβάνει χώρα στα κοινωνικά δίκτυα σε μεγάλο βαθμό και πώς/σε ποιους εκφράζονται, ενώ συγχρόνως η ίδια η εταιρεία έχει μπει στη διαδικασία επιλογής συγκεκριμένων ζευγαριών για να προβληθούν. Παράλληλα, είναι πρόδηλη η μετάβαση από τις τηλεοπτικές διαφημίσεις στις διαφημίσεις που «ζουν» και αναπαράγονται στα μέσα κοινωνικής δικτύωσης, στα οποία ο καταναλωτής/τηλεθεατής έχει άμεση δυνατότητα αντίδρασης (react:like/love/dislike) στο προβαλλόμενο διαφημιστικό σποτ.
Στη συνέχεια, σε αντίστιξη με αυτό το παράδειγμα, αποφάσισα να ασχοληθώ με την διαφήμιση της εταιρείας παιχνιδιών Jumbo (παραγωγή και πώληση παιχνιδιών και ειδών για το σπίτι) του 2016, με τίτλο “Χτύπα σαν άνδρας”. Πέρα από τον προκλητικό τίτλο της διαφήμισης, έχουμε ένα τηλεοπτικό σποτ στο οποίο πρωταγωνιστεί η ελληνίδα λαϊκή τραγουδίστρια Άντζελα Δημητρίου, ερμηνεύοντας διασκευασμένους στίχους από ένα δικό της λαϊκό τραγούδι με τίτλο ‘Ποια θυσία’. Η «πλοκή» είναι λιτή- η διαφήμιση διαδραματίζεται χρονικά το Μεγάλο Σάββατο κατά το οποίο ο κόσμος έχει πάει στην εκκλησία για την Ανάσταση του Ιησού, κατά το χριστιανικό έθιμο και μέσα στο πλήθος που προβάλλεται είναι και η πρωταγωνίστριά μας. Αφού η φιγούρα της γίνει αναγνωρίσιμη, ξεκινάει να τραγουδάει το ερωτικό άσμα για τον σύντροφό της που την έχει αφήσει για μία άλλη γυναίκα. Συγχρόνως, ενώ προχωράει η ίδια, η κάμερα δείχνει ένα ζευγάρι στο μπαλκόνι οπότε και ο άνδρας προσφέρει στην γυναίκα του ένα λουλούδι και αμέσως μετά μία οικογένεια η οποία έχει μαζευτεί στο τραπέζι για να γιορτάσουν την Ανάσταση και την διακοπή της νηστείας, που λαμβάνει χώρα κατά το θρησκευτικό έθιμο την περίοδο της Σαρακοστής. Η ερμηνεία τελειώνει μόλις η πρωταγωνίστρια συναντά τον πρώην φίλο της, μένει άναυδη που τον βλέπει και σηκώνει ένα πασχαλινό αυγό και λέει «Χτύπα, χτύπα σαν άνδρας» και η διαφήμιση τελειώνει. Αυτή η φράση ήταν το έναυσμα για να μελετήσω τη συγκεκριμένη διαφήμιση αντιπαραθέτοντάς την με την καμπάνια της Λάκτα, γιατί αν και είναι τελείως αντιθετικές μεταξύ τους ως προς τον τρόπο προσέγγισης των ανδρικοτήτων και των θηλυκοτήτων που προβάλλονται, τις έμφυλες σχέσεις και τα στερεότυπα για τα «ζευγάρια», η δημόσια συζήτηση που δημιουργήθηκε και για τις δύο αυτές καμπάνιες έλαβε μέρος κυρίως στα μέσα κοινωνικής δικτύωσης με το κοινό να αντιδράει άμεσα προς τα θέματα που αναφέρθηκαν ότι εγείρονται και έχοντας ανάμεικτα συναισθήματα. Και στις δύο περιπτώσεις οι αναμεσοποιήσεις όπως και οι αναπαραγωγές συγκεκριμένων φωτογραφιών της μίας περίπτωσης και λεπτών της δεύτερης ποικίλλουν, γεγονός που θα μας απασχολήσει στη συνέχεια της εργασίας. Αξίζει, επίσης, να σημειωθεί για τη διαφήμιση του Jumbo η απαγορευτική απόφαση προβολής και ύπαρξης από κάθε κανάλι που διαθέτει η εταιρεία από το ΕΣΡ. Βέβαια, αυτή είναι μία απόφαση η οποία δεν εκτελέστηκε απόλυτα, αφού η διαφήμιση μετά από προσωπική μου έρευνα στο κανάλι της στο YouTube, αντιλήφθηκα ότι υπάρχει κανονικά. Η απόφαση του ΕΣΡ πάρθηκε ύστερα από παρέμβαση της Γενικής Γραμματείας Ισότητας των Φύλων, αφού χαρακτήρισε το σποτ ως «επικίνδυνο» ως προς τα πρότυπα που αναπαράγει και τα μηνύματα που περνάει, με την επαναληπτική φράση «Χτύπα, χτύπα σαν άνδρας».
Οι δύο αυτές διαφημιστικές παραγωγές αποτελούν τα εθνογραφικά παραδείγματα αυτής της πτυχιακής εργασίας καθώς προσεγγίζουν το θέμα των έμφυλων προτύπων και των κοινωνικών στερεοτύπων από διαφορετικές οπτικές γωνίες. Η πρώτη (#ActforLove) θα μπορούσε να χαρακτηριστεί ως ριζοσπαστική η προσέγγισή της, αφού όπως υποστηρίζει και η ίδια η εταιρεία, φωτογραφίζει «28 διαφορετικά ζευγάρια». Το ζήτημα είναι βέβαια κατά πόσο εν τέλει είναι διαφορετικά αυτά τα ζευγάρια, για ποιους λόγους θεωρούνται ως τέτοια, ποιος ο αντίκτυπος στον κοινωνικό ιστό και κατά πόσο ονομάζοντάς τα και καταδεικνύοντάς τα ως «διαφορετικά» ενισχύεται η «ετεροκανονικότητα». Η δεύτερη περίπτωση μπορεί να χαρακτηριστεί ως μία «παραδοσιακή» παρουσίαση των έμφυλων ρόλων- η γυναίκα σε μειονεκτική θέση που θρηνεί έναν χωρισμό και ο ηγεμονικός άνδρας που «χτυπά». Σε αυτή την περίπτωση, το κεντρικό σημείο ενδιαφέροντος είναι ποια γυναικεία και ανδρικά πρότυπα αναπαράγονται μέσω της διαφήμισης, αν όντως αναπαράγονται έτσι όπως απεικονίζονται, ποια η συνέχεια ζωής αυτής της διαφήμισης, εφόσον απαγορεύτηκε, και ποιες οι δυνατότητες επανερμηνείας και κριτικής από τους χρήστες των δικτύων.

Αυτά είναι δύο παραδείγματα, ανάμεσα σε πολλά άλλα, μέσω των οποίων απεικονίζονται κοινωνικά, εθνοτικά και έμφυλα στερεότυπα, που όμως δεν απασχόλησαν περαιτέρω το κοινωνικό σύνολο πέρα από την ολιγόλεπτη διάρκεια προβολής τους στην τηλεόραση. Ο λόγος για τον οποίο επέλεξα να μελετήσω από ανθρωπολογική σκοπιά τις συγκεκριμένες περιπτώσεις της Λάκτα και του Jumbo είναι γιατί πιστεύω πως αποτελούν δύο καίρια παραδείγματα για να ανοίξει μία συζήτηση για το φύλο, τη σεξουαλικότητα, την κοινωνική συμπεριφορά (νόρμες) που «υποχρεούται» κάθε κοινωνικό υποκείμενο να ακολουθήσει καθώς και ποιες οι συνέπειες αυτών των επιλογών. Επίσης, ο καταλυτικός παράγοντας για την ενασχόλησή μου με αυτές τις διαφημίσεις, είναι η συνέχιση «ζωής» τους στα μέσα κοινωνικής δικτύωσης, καθώς και ο σάλος αντιδράσεων που προκλήθηκαν στο διαδίκτυο. Είναι η απόδειξη της μετάβασης από την παλαιού τύπου τηλεοπτική διαφήμιση στη νέα, διαδραστική μορφή που μπορεί να πάρει στα social media.
Συγκεκριμένα, θα επικεντρωθούμε στην μελέτη της πλατφόρμας του Facebook και του Youtube. Το Facebook ως χώρος διά-δράσης και αλληλεπίδρασης μεταξύ των υποκειμένων δίνει τη δυνατότητα στα υποκείμενα-χρήστες τη δημιουργία προσωπικού προφίλ καθώς πλέον στην web 2.0 τεχνολογία επικρατεί η λογική της διαφάνειας. Η πλατφόρμα του YouTube, δημιουργημένη το 2005, αποτελεί έναν ιστότοπο που επιτρέπει την κοινοποίηση, αναπαραγωγή και αναζήτηση ψηφιακών βίντεο (μουσική, ταινίες, ντοκιμαντέρ κλπ), μέσω δημιουργίας προσωπικού λογαριασμού/προφίλ. Η συγκεκριμένη πλατφόρμα δεν αποτελεί μόνο μέσο επικοινωνίας αλλά είναι ιδωμένη ως μία βάση δεδομένων με δύο όψεις – οι χρήστες διατηρούν και ελέγχουν τα αρχεία τους την ίδια στιγμή που και η πλατφόρμα τα διαχειρίζεται. Χαρακτηριστικό παρόμοιο με την πλατφόρμα του Facebook, όπου υπάρχουν τα ψηφιακά άλμπουμ τα οποία έχει ο χρήστης στο προφίλ του. Επομένως, και οι δύο πλατφόρμες, όπως και τα περισσότερα μέσα κοινωνικής δικτύωσης πλέον, -ακόμη και η φωτογραφία- διέπονται από την φιλοσοφία του after- life media, δηλαδή της συνέχισης ζωής του κάθε ποστ, φωτογραφία, βίντεο κλπ. πέρα από την αρχική του, πρώτη δημοσίευση.
Οι λόγοι για τους οποίους λοιπόν επέλεξα αυτές τις δύο διαφημιστικές αναπαραστάσεις προς μελέτη είναι αρχικά η έκταση που έλαβαν και οι δύο στα μέσα κοινωνικής δικτύωσης και οι αντιδράσεις που προκάλεσαν. Επίσης, είναι και τα δύο πολύ ηχηρά παραδείγματα για να ανοίξουμε μία συζήτηση σχετικά με το ποια έμφυλα στερεοτυπικά πρότυπα αναπαράγονται μέσω των διαφημιστικών παραγωγών, ποιός ο αντίκτυπος αυτών στον κοινωνικό ιστό και τέλος για ποιους λόγους τα memes υπάρχουν ακόμη και μετά την απαγόρευση της διαφήμισης του Jumbo.
Επομένως, όπως θα δούμε παρακάτω, βασιζόμενη στις προαναφερθείσες διαφημιστικές αναπαραστάσεις και σε θεωρίες για το φύλο, την εικόνα/φωτογραφία, την αναπαράσταση, τα μέσα κοινωνικής δικτύωσης και τα μιμίδια θα γίνει σε αυτή την εργασία μία προσπάθεια μελέτης και απάντησης στα ερωτήματα που θέτω.

Since the popularisation of the internet, low-income Brazilians have received little government support to help them access it. In response, they have largely self-financed their digital migration. Internet cafés became prosperous businesses in working-class neighbourhoods and rural settlements, and, more recently, families have aspired to buy their own home computer with hire purchase agreements. As low-income Brazilians began to access popular social media sites in the mid-2000s, affluent Brazilians ridiculed their limited technological skills, different tastes and poor schooling, but this did not deter them from expanding their online presence. Young people created profiles for barely literate older relatives and taught them to navigate platforms such as Facebook and WhatsApp.

Based on 15 months of ethnographic research, this book aims to understand why low-income Brazilians have invested so much of their time and money in learning about social media. Juliano Spyer explores this question from a number of perspectives, including education, relationships, work and politics. He argues that the use of social media reflects contradictory values. Low-income Brazilians embrace social media to display literacy and upward mobility, but the same technology also strengthens traditional networks of support that conflict with individualism.