A Digital Anthropology Reading List

A beautiful ethnography of machine gamblers in Las Vegas. Dow Schull explores the nature of addictive relationships with machines, experiences of embodiment, and the ethics of designing technological systems.

While a bit academically dense to read, Haraway’s reframing of the Cyborg is an eternal classic.

An ethnography conducted entirely within the virtual world of Second Life. This is widely considered the first substantial ethnography of an online community. Tom Boellstroff pioneered the idea digital spaces should be taken seriously as cultural fieldsites.

Kelty spends an extensive amount of time among start-ups, hackers, and Free Software advocates to try and understand the open-source software movement. He examines how it shifted the power dynamics of creation, and challenged who has authority to build and share knowledge.

Dourish and Bell examine the dream of

through an anthropological lens: as a shared cultural narrative, as a driver of resources and funding, and as a utopian vision that is impossibly messy in reality. This one is great for understanding what it means to “think anthropologically” about a subject.

An ethnography of “hackers” and creators of open-source software. Coleman spends time with people in the F/OSS movement and examines how they collaborate, how they understand terms like “free speech” and “freedom,” and generally explores hacker culture.