A Brief Introduction to Digital Anthropology

It's more than a voyeuristic insight into people who sit at slot machines for 48 hours straight though. The garish floors of Las Vegas casinos become a venue to explore our embodied relationships with machines, the nature of technological dependence, and the potential hazards of mixing algorithmic systems with Capitalist incentives.

The book was my gateway drug into the field of digital anthropology (also known as back then), as well as its sister discipline (STS).

I fell for it hard. The way everyone falls for big, intoxicating ideas at twenty-one. Like Marxism or Foucauldian Power or Quantum String Theory. But unlike my other intellectual flings, this one stuck with me.

It led to a thesis on the

After a few professional detours through illustration, web design, programming, and art direction, I'm circling back to my digital anthropology roots.

This means I'm being asked the question “so... what is digital anthropology?” far more frequently.

Forgive the obviousness of this, but as it says on the tin, it's the intersection of cultural anthropology and digital things.

Let's break these two down because they're both open to generous interpretation.

Cultural anthropology is the study of human culture – our narratives, symbols, rituals, habits, beliefs and norms.

Or as put it, it's all the webs of meaning and significance we spin for ourselves .

That might sound pointlessly generic. Plenty of disciplines study culture – sociologists, historians, and economists among them.

What defines Anthropologists is that we study culture through participant observation – the act of completely immersing yourself in another culture for a long period of time as both an active participant in it, and an observer of it. You join in the dance and then analyse what the dance means.

Essentially, we study culture at an “on the ground" level – looking for the individual stories, rich details, particular nuances, and you can only find by spending extended time with people in their daily lives.
As opposed to pointing a telescope at them from afar, bringing them into labs to run hypothetical experiments, or amassing troves of personal data and analysing it for the 'big trends'.

If you want to know more about Anthropology, I can enthusiastically recommend Tim Ingold's short but beautiful introduction .

By digital things I mean objects and systems based on binary logic – the 1's and 0's that run all of modern computing.

Given that digital systems are now pervasive across human societies and take on a million manifestations, it feels a bit trite to try and define them. But this description fits quite well.

It comes from Miller & Horst's essential introduction : A Prospectus for Digital Anthropology

Binary code enables us to simplify information down into single bytes that can be easily stored, copied, manipulated and sent through fibre optic cables at warp speed. It's what makes all modern communication technologies possible. It's also a sufficient catch-all category for the kinds of things Digital Anthropologists study.

We're into algorithms, data, anything to do with the internet, robotics, programming, virtual currencies, the gig economy, wearable devices, ubiquitous computing, and yes, weird subcultures in the dark corners of 4chan.

Or more specifically, we're interested in understanding the cultural symbolism, narratives, beliefs, rituals, taboos, economics, power dynamics, and daily practices around those things. I've put together