Digital Migration

By Patricia G. Lange

Migration patterns have long drawn the attention of anthropologists. Contemporary humans and their ancestors have been running across the globe for millennia. As it happens, humans run all over the internet too. In the context of mediated environments, to migrate away from a site means that participants stop using it and instead move on to explore and interact on new internet vistas. The digital migration story as seen through the lens of socially-motivated YouTubers reveals a dynamic kaleidoscope of patterns that shed light on human mediation. A multi-year ethnography of vloggers revealed nuanced and consistent digital migration tendencies. Key questions of interest include: 1) When do people deploy multiple forms of media and “swap them” in and out for social reasons? 2) Under what circumstances do participants more permanently leave one site and go to another, or several others? and 3) How might anthropologists build a collective conversation about digital migration patterns?

The dazzling array of media that is available to many people around the world produces what Madianou and Miller (2012) refer to as a “polymedia” environment. According to this concept, when people have access to media such that price, availability, and digital skills are not factors in deciding uptake of a technology or influencing consistent usage, people “socialize” media. In other words, aspects of dealing with relationships and sociality more centrally influence how and why a particular medium is selected. People choose from a “plurality of media which supplement each other and can help overcome the shortcomings of a particular medium” (Madianou and Miller 2012: 8). Madianou and Miller studied people who were not economically privileged. Yet, they had access to a “plethora” of media, and their decisions about which medium to use revealed much about their relationships and sociality. For example, people might choose email over a phone call to avoid unpleasant confrontation in a particular relationship. Participants use social and emotional criteria to select particular media from an array of choices that are equally available and plausible for them to use. 

Media choice is at times influenced by personal factors that index issues of control. Research on young people on YouTube suggested that participants tended to display “media dispositions” in that they strongly preferred certain media and avoided others (Lange 2014). For example, in a study of “digital youth,” one study participant said she would never post of a video of herself on YouTube. She said, “I don’t really like the idea of anyone in the world being able to watch me do something.” Despite being able to participate on YouTube infrastructurally and economically, her media disposition clearly showed that recording YouTube videos of herself was not desirable. Her reasoning suggests that what appears to be a personal choice was also influenced by aspects of sociality. She preferred to control her image vis-à-vis larger populations by withholding it. Ultimately, she preferred to engage with YouTuber as a viewer.

Interview narratives from a study of adult users of YouTube who used the site socially in its early years, also reveal instances of how participants took advantage of alternative types of media to “overcome the shortcomings” of YouTube. My ethnographic film, Hey Watch This! Sharing the Self Through Media (2020) was filmed at grass roots meet-ups across the United States (and one in Canada) in which observations of participants’ interactions as well as ethnographic interviews revealed important information about YouTube sociality through video. 

In the film, interviewees describe how they used the live video chat service of Stickam to deepen their social connections and simply have fun with other YouTubers. Stickam (2005 – 2013) was a live video chat service that enabled participants to see and communicate with other people simultaneously through video feeds. It offered a limited number of “boxes” or windows containing the live feed of several participants, as well as an option for text chat. In one meet-up in Toronto depicted in the film, a live Stickam chat session was displayed on a very large screen, thus enabling in-person participants to enjoy interacting with remote YouTubers who could not attend the gathering.

Interviewees in my ethnographic study noted that they enjoyed participating on Stickam because it felt more “live” or present than YouTube’s asynchronous atmosphere. Interviewees also noted that responses times were far more rapid on Stickam than on YouTube, in terms of receiving feedback on videos. Instead of waiting for two or three weeks for feedback on a posted video, YouTubers could get responses immediately and interactively through video chat. Burgess and Green (2018 [2009]: 101) made a similar observation and characterized Stickam as a “supplement” or “plug in” to YouTube, thus illustrating the “polymedia” aspect of YouTube and Stickam.

Unlike other documentaries that are character driven, Hey Watch this! is constructed in a modular way around themes of YouTubers’ experiences when using an array of media. Two themes that clearly emerged from the interview narratives were reflections on where participants saw the “real me” located across different types of media, and their views on the status of their YouTube participation over time. Some YouTubers felt that they could be more their “real selves” on Stickam as opposed to YouTube, which felt less live and was more public. Interviewees expressed concern about having their videos exposed to hostile audiences and “haters,” or people who post mean-spirited or pointless comments or insults. Initially, their use of Stickam represented a pattern more consistent with being in a polymedia environment. Later on, however, their concerns about YouTube and its monetization trajectory prompted them to greatly reduce their participation on the site. They began migrating to other social media such as Twitter.

Hey Watch This! documents the results of a multi-year ethnography. Although it is not always feasible, long-term ethnographic projects offer certain advantages. Sociologist Henri Lefebvre (2004) draws on a rubric he termed “rhythm analysis” to analyze cycles or patterns of behavior, a lens which is productively applied in studying internet migratory patterns. A long-term engagement enables the ethnographer to see large-scale patterns or cycles of interaction that are not necessarily visible when studying a group over a few short months. For example, when I began filming the documentary, YouTubers were very excited about using the site in social ways, to bond with other people in shared “communities of interest” such as those who wished to learn about video, or who shared similar difficult life experiences. By the end of the filming, interviewees expressed dismay over YouTube’s highly commercialized environment and told me they were no longer participating on the site with the same intensity. A long-term engagement helps document the kinds of cycles or patterns that Lefebvre saw as important for understanding the inner workings of society. In this the case the cycle began with initial excitement for the site, proceeded to exhibit a high point of feelings of community with other YouTubers, and then saw a decline a few years later as interest in the site cooled and people moved on to other social media.

A glance at some of their YouTube channels confirmed their self-observations about their dwindling participation on the site. Nuances about digital migration emerged from their narratives. Whereas some participants engaged in “radical migration” in which they made a complete break with YouTube, others engaged in a more “conceptual migration” in which they cooled or stopped using YouTube for the most part, but they brought the “concept” or idea of YouTube sociality to a new site, in this case Twitter (Lange 2019). Mechanisms that support a conceptual migration to Twitter from YouTube included retaining their YouTube channel name on the new site, interacting with other YouTube participants on Twitter, providing links on YouTube to their Twitter channel, and continuing to talk about YouTube and other shared video-related themes of interest on their new social media site.

In a conceptual migration, participation on a particular site such as YouTube may not be completely severed but finds its way onto a new site. One interviewee insisted that his lack of activity on YouTube and his move to Twitter was not a “migration.” He continued to see Twitter as something to use “in addition to” YouTube. Yet, he removed many of his YouTube videos and no longer posts there. Nevertheless, his view clarifies and supports the analysis that YouTube as an idea retains purchase on a new site conceptually. The idea of YouTube never quite goes away even though from a participatory standpoint, a migration has occurred because YouTube is no longer used with consistent intensity.

Characterizing these patterns and discovering additional nuances will be important for future studies in digital ethnography. YouTubers also spoke of what I refer to as “in-migration” in which people do not leave a site, but rather start a new account within the same site that they feel better reflects their current interests and media persona (Lange 2019). On YouTube, this means opening a new channel and posting new types of videos. Another conceptualization is the idea of “virtual diaspora,” in which a site closes and its participants “flee to other virtual worlds” (Boellstorff 2008: 197). Participants may be very upset and long for a new platform in which to interact. Boellstorff (2008: 197-198) refers to this configuration as a “virtual diaspora.” He also notes that “lesser forms” of virtual diaspora appear when a site simply becomes less popular and participants leave for another site, again illustrating the notion of digital migration.

Use of the word “diaspora” in this context may initially be somewhat controversial for some scholars. To anthropologists, diaspora connote groups of people who are violently or at least suddenly separated from their homeland to which they may never return. Notably, it is certainly possible that groups who are suddenly ejected from their online home world might feel a profound sense of loss and confusion. Clearly strong feelings may accompany the loss of online sites, which may represent a very important social life line for dispersed individuals, especially marginalized people who rely on internet sites to find crucial social support. Loss of an online, anchoring site might well prompt people to experience intense social mourning. Whether such patterns constitute “diaspora” in the emotional sense must be studied in each case. An umbrella term such as digital migration is arguably useful for encompassing many different forms of migration and emotional responses that appear. 

Moving forward, it is important that anthropologists continue a collective conversation about online migration patterns and come to terms with nuances that are revealed. A long-term approach is beneficial in this context given that it may take several years for migratory patterns to be fully revealed. In my observation, intensive participation for some of the YouTubers lasted a few years before they migrated away. Saying good-bye to one site may index a permanent break with most social media, or it may mean saying hello to a new site. Studying such patterns is of value to anthropologists who wish to understand the cultural, social, technical, economic, and other factors that influence how people to choose to share the self through media. My anthropological antennae are receiving strong signals that digital migration will be a fascinating terrain of study for years to come.

References

Boellstorff, Tom. 2008. Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Burgess, Jean, and Joshua Green. 2009. YouTube: Online Video and Participatory Culture. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. 

Constine, Josh. 2013. “Scene Kids Cry as Streaming Site Stickam Shuts Down.” TechCrunch. January 31. http://techcrunch.com/2013/01/31/scene-kids-cry-as-streaming-site-stickam -shuts-down/. 

Lange, Patricia G. 2019. Thanks for Watching: An Anthropological Study of Video Sharing on YouTube. Louisville, CO: University Press of Colorado. https://upcolorado.com/university-press-of-colorado/item/3737-thanks-for-watching

Lange, Patricia G. 2020. Hey Watch This! Sharing the Self Through Media. 54 minutes. https://vimeo.com/394007182

Madianou, Mirca, and Daniel Miller. 2012. Migration and New Media: Transnational Families and Polymedia. Abingdon, UK: Routledge.


Lefebvre, Henri. 2004. Rhythmanalysis. London: Continuum.

“Stickam.” n.d. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stickam.


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Three Lies of Digital Ethnography
by Gabriele de Seta

We ethnographers cannot help but lie, but in lying, we reveal truths that escape those who are not so bold. (Fine, 1993, p. 290)

Let’s start with a conclusion: Ethnographers lie.

This might not be a widely shared proposition, but I experience it often in my own work, especially when talking in practical terms about my fieldwork. The more the weeks of traveling between Chinese cities, staying at friends’ houses and transcribing their social media interactions recede back into the past, the more I doubt about the scholarly value of the ethnographic study of digital folklore I say I have conducted. I realize that an assemblage of disciplinary imperatives, epistemological nudges and promises of legitimation I have internalized during my scholarly formation keeps determining how I carefully massage the description of my research project according to the needs of the moment.

As I distort my fieldwork experience into elevator pitches and small talk during conference breaks, I realize that I am enacting the gentle calisthenics of professionalism and persuasion. Like a well-trained marketer, I avoid discussing the challenging aspects of my research or my actual methodological practices, and instead piece together strings of buzzwords and abstracted data points intended to prove my disciplinary belonging – I simplify some things, hide others, and casually lie when convenient.

Despite the unpleasant aftertaste of these performances, the tensions motivating my resort to half-truths, strategic simplifications and circumstantial lies are nothing new: Like many other academic domains, anthropology has its own disciplinary culture, and methodology is perhaps the level at which disciplinary discursivity is at its most evident. Foregrounding the spatial and temporal dimensions of one’s fieldwork remains a reliable marker of authority, and narrowing down one’s interests to a bounded community and a well-defined topic still helps expert validation.

At the same time, the relative novelty of certain research domains (in my case, vernacular creativity on digital media) makes them more prone to generalizations, and requires simplifying the presentation of one’s work when pushing back against insinuations of “having it too easy” with fieldwork done by “simply spending all day on social media” to follow “fashionable topics” such as Internet memes, selfies or online celebrity.

One of the pieces of writing that most helped me come to terms with this feeling of unease is a Gary Alan Fine article titled “Ten lies of ethnography” (1993). In this liberating piece, Fine skirts the fascination for laying bare the uncomfortable truths of the trade, and instead focuses on the unavoidable practices of lying that accompany much ethnographic research. According to Fine, illusions about the underside of ethnography, regularly hidden in its methodological backstage, are necessary for both the production of good work and occupational survival, but become problematic when they take root in the discipline and become taken for real by its practitioners.

Inspired by how Fine identifies ten lies of ethnography behind the classical virtues and technical skills of figures such as the “friendly ethnographer,” the “unobtrusive ethnographer” and the “chaste ethnographer”, I want to put forward three more lies peculiar to digital ethnography, which I briefly describe below, accompanied by their respective authorial archetypes.

The networked field-weaver

The first lie of digital ethnography is related to one of the most widely debated ethnographic constructions – the ‘field’. Questioned, fragmented and deconstructed in the wake of the writing culture debates, the field remains an important anchor for ethnographic practice. When I embarked into my (by then overly-theorized) fieldwork, the most convincing metaphor I had come across was the one offered by Jenna Burrell in her proposition of the “field site as network” (2009). Building upon previous theorizations of multi-sited ethnography, Burrell emphasizes how it is the ethnographer herself, through the everyday tracing of different actors, that pulls together the field as a network.

I found myself adopting Burrell’s insight as an effective soundbite: My own “field as network” included a bunch of friend and acquaintances, longer and shorter stays in eight Chinese cities, a number of online platforms, an inventory of mobile devices, a sample of linguistic repertoires, certain genres of online content, mass media discourses about the internet, and a variety of media practices.

As many solutions that seem to work all too well, I started realizing that my idealized reliance on weaving my field as a network was built on hiding and lying about something. Rather than experiencing the expansive movement of branching out promised by this metaphor, I often found myself building my “field as network” by grasping at straws, and immediately cutting away most of what came along with them. Weaving networks into an ethnographic field can bring the most disparate things together, and particularly when one’s research topic isn’t extremely narrow, each node of the network can result in dizzying vertigos over a wealth of potential interlocutors, unexplored communities, or entirely new categories of data.

In order to decide what does or doesn’t belong in one’s research project (and, ultimately, to produce a viable written report) the ethnographer continuously prunes down networks as they proliferate, carving out a skeletal “field as network” that eventually feels more like a crooked bonsai tree than an expanse of thick experiential wilderness. The lie of the ethnographer as networked field-weaver should be kept in mind as it hides the cutting as much it glorifies the pulling together.

The eager participant-lurker

The second lie of digital ethnography relates to the central practice of this research approach: Participant observation. Participation in digital media bleeds over a linear spectrum going from non-use to intensive and active presence, and extends in different dimensions according to the platforms used, the devices at hand, software availability, access to connectivity in time and space, as well as the social circles and practices one participates in.

In the earliest pioneering ethnographies of online settings, researchers found in the figure of the ‘lurker’ a productive archetype embodying the contradictory status of participation on the internet. Reflecting on this figure of participation, Leander & McKim (2003) conclude that, in choosing between being an active participant or a lurker, a digital ethnographer makes important epistemological decisions. Given the increasing variety of modes of participation offered by digital media platforms, more recent debates have tried to move beyond a clear-cut choice between active participation and lurking, and to instead explore the creation of intersubjectivity as a fluid outcome of a sustained ethnographic engagement (Beaulieau, 2004).

While cognizant of this fluid spectrum of modes of participation, I still feel the need to condense my engagement into simplified vignettes highlighting my presence in various digitally-mediated contexts, flattening my involvement into easily understandable nuggets of interaction that prove my active participation in the field. Confronted by the injunctions of participant observation, I often write myself into an eager participant-lurker: A professionally naive explorer of local online contexts, master of all modes of participation, surveying digital media use from a vantage point of carefully crafted presence.

The false choice between naturalist lurking and active involvement is something I still struggle with whenever I inscribe myself onto the field. As digital ethnographers, we participate (just like our ‘research participants’) through a wide range of modes of participation tightly linked to social dynamics and technological affordances that go from the choice of shutting off one’s smartphone to the visceral need to sustain one’s presence in a tense online discussion. Embracing the fluidity, uncertainty and ambivalence resulting from these situated choices should be preferred over flattening one’s own persona into the stereotyped figure of the eager participant-lurker.

The expert fabricator

The third lie of digital ethnography has to do with representation, an unavoidable component of producing any sort of research output. Digital ethnographers have the advantage of working with already thoroughly-mediated settings, and are able to include in their reports samples of online resources, snippets of mediated interactions, creative data visualizations, as well as images, videos and sounds. Yet, the increasing availability of multimedia traces does not mean that ethnographic texts become less representational. Even when grounded on extensive datasets, hundreds of fieldnotes and collections of user traces, the accounts produced by digital ethnographers end up including an extremely narrow selection of inscriptions, often thoroughly edited, translated, scrambled, rephrased, anonymized, cropped, selectively blurred and collated according to a bundle of ethical, rhetorical and aesthetic decisions.

Responding to the recurring dilemmas faced by researchers dealing with new and heterogeneous concretions of data, Annette Markham provocatively argues that digital ethnographers should embrace the suspicious practice of fabrication in order to overcome paralyzing tendencies in qualitative research, and to embed ethics inductively into research practice (2012, p. 341). Fabrication, though, is inextricably linked to the idea of expertise. In claiming and embracing one’s role as editor, translator and fabricator of multimedia composites of events, identities and inscriptions, the digital ethnographer implicitly establishes competence and knowledgeability over a certain sociotechnical context.

While I enjoy the flattering attributions of expertise over my research topic that these fabrications occasionally grant me, I often feel troubled by the way they blur my authorial role into the figure of the social media savvy or the computer geek, hiding how most of my ethnographic knowledge is actually grounded on a patchy process of discovery, a messy interaction between my puzzled inquiries and the kind help of patient friends who bear with my often clueless questions about the latest Internet meme or slang term.

Digital ethnographers are often closer to practical brokers, curious newcomers relying on the knowledgeability and interpretive guidance of what Holmes & Marcus call “paraethnographers” (2008). It is important to remember how the figure of the expert fabricator can become an enticing professional illusion that easily overrides the messy, processual and thickly social construction of local expertise.

How to lie with digital ethnography

The goal of this post is decidedly not to “tell the truth” in the (ideally) public space of an academic blog, nor to reveal an ugly or cynical reality behind my practice of digital ethnography, nor to accuse colleagues of engaging in dishonesty and deception; rather, the three illusive figures described above embody discursive strategies, performative misdirections and illusory identities that I regularly confront in my thinking, speaking and writing about my own research work.

My hope is that both colleagues approaching the disciplinary domain of digital ethnography, as well as fellow researchers already familiar with this methodological assemblage, will recognize their own doubts and concerns in some of these sketched portraits. As Gary Alan Fine reminds us, it is important to constantly ask ourselves: Which professional illusions are current in our research field? Which issues do we pressure each other to devise half-truths about? Which circumstantial lies do we use to cover the tracks leading to our decisions?

Rather than telling readers how to ‘do’ digital ethnography, I’d rather suggest that we familiarize ourselves with the lies hidden by the contemporary archetypes of the networked field-weaver, the eager participant-lurker and the expert fabricator, before they become professional illusions hiding more than they reveal.

Image credits: This essay is illustrated by @deathnography

Dr Gabriele de Seta is a media anthropologist. He holds a PhD in Sociology from the Hong Kong Polytechnic University and has recently completed a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica in Taipei, Taiwan. His research work, grounded on ethnographic engagement across multiple sites, focuses on digital media practices and vernacular creativity in contemporary China. He is also interested in experimental music scenes, Internet art, and collaborative intersections between anthropology and art practice. More information is available on his website.

Crystal Abidin

Dr Crystal Abidin is a socio-cultural anthropologist of vernacular internet cultures, particularly young people’s relationships with internet celebrity, self-curation, and vulnerability. She is Postdoctoral Fellow with the Media Management and Transformation Centre (MMTC) at Jönköping University, and Adjunct Researcher with the Centre for Culture and Technology (CCAT) at Curtin University. Crystal’s forthcoming book, Internet Celebrity: Understanding Fame Online (Emerald Publishing, 2018) critically analyzes the contemporary histories and impacts of internet-native celebrity today. Reach her at wishcrys.com or @wishcrys.

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We Have Never Been Digital Anthropologists
by Rebekah Cupitt

Ethnography: A Chimera

Ethnography is the methodological chimera of Anthropology, composed of a snake (the researcher, who insinuates into other people’s lives), a lion (the fieldwork, the daunting practice through which we fall bodily into an ‘other’s’ world), and a goat (the task of writing, that has us consuming our fieldwork experiences, masticating and digesting them into the more palatable documents that we then publish and share). Ethnography is a multi-headed beast with mythical qualities – and I am of course paraphrasing John Law here, who writes that method in the social sciences is a multi-headed beast (Law 2004, p. 4). In this post, I want to foreground the chimeric nature of ethnography because it was only once I situated myself in an interdisciplinary research setting and a technologically saturated field site, that I realized how little the epistemological frameworks and methodological toolkits of digital anthropology had prepared me to make sense of the digital itself.

While all heads of the ethnographic chimera warrant examination, the primary focus of this short blog post is on the lion’s head: The fieldwork experience that roars loud enough to be heard even in other disciplines. How does ethnography shift, change and morph when it is carried out in digitally saturated settings? Here follow some reflections upon my own experiences of doing research at Swedish Television alongside the production team that creates and curates its programming in Swedish Sign Language (SVT Teckenspråk). Doing participant observation and becoming entangled with the people and other entities at SVT Teckenspråk left me considering how the very foundations of ethnography relate to the digital. As a result, I began to wonder whether the notion of ‘digital anthropology’ has not perhaps become inordinate.

The Lion: Fieldwork

Arguably, the fiercest head of the ethnographic chimera is the lion: The practice of fieldwork an ethnography is based upon. In my case, fieldwork included participant observation, interviews, photographs, films – you know, the regular devices of field research. Fieldwork is perhaps the one aspect of Anthropology that, through its sheer dogmatism, stands as the proud figurehead of the discipline. Since the Malinowskian cries about extended periods of “isolated study” in the Trobriand Islands, to the Geertzian occupation of the native’s point of view, and into contemporary debates on the form fieldwork should take (Marcus & Okely 2008), fieldwork has been Anthropology’s primary method of understanding ‘the other’, digital or otherwise. Each field site is distinct, and a first step on our roads to becoming professional anthropologists requires us to navigate our First Encounters and adapt our methodologies as a compulsory rite de passage.

Finding myself in a field site that stretched from technologically saturated editing suites, sound mixing rooms and film studios to equally technological filming locations, video meeting rooms, and the production team’s own computer-centered office spaces, my primary difficulty was fitting my own fieldwork practices and conceptualization of the digital with those of the employees at SVT Teckenspråk. In the daily lives of the Swedish Television’s production team that worked hard on programming in Swedish Sign Language, the digital was unremarkable and mundane.

At SVT Teckenspråk, technology is important in some settings but unimportant in others; it is new and old in a disconcerting mix. Brand new mixing equipment interfaces with archaic microphones; a top-of-the-line monitor is connected to a 7-year old video-meeting system; someone is running a brand new version of Microsoft Office on an outdated PC, and so on. The definition of new technology is not as fixed as we might assume, and what seems entirely new soon becomes thoroughly old. What we perhaps mean, as anthropologists, when we talk about ‘new technologies’, is that we are ourselves discovering new communication forms that are carried out via technologies that are as new to us as they are to our discipline. At SVT Teckenspråk, the entire workplace was rife with technologies of work – new, old, redundant, essential – all tangled up in one big mess of cables.

However, a conflict arises when a reference to the digital comes to signify a new disciplinary frontier on the researcher’s end: Emphasizing the digital as a way to contribute to the understanding of society at large, and to prove that Anthropology still matters. A scale of possible responses to this contradiction stretches across a spectrum including: The extreme decision to abandon the native’s point of view and depict a field site rife with objects of digital anthropological fascination; a choice to render the objects as conduits for novel human behavior while emphasizing their embeddedness in pre-existing patterns of everyday life; or an equally radical stance that gives up posturing the digital as a new frontier and instead recognizes that the field under study is a place filled with practices much like the one the researcher herself may come from – where technology is inextricably and unassumingly entangled in the everyday. Confronted with this dilemma, I chose the last option, but only after pondering on a critical question: How can fieldwork of the mundane be carried out when the researcher themselves is conceptualizing their fieldwork as discovering ‘new’ sociocultural territory? The implicit futurist and technocentric innovation and pioneering spirit I was surrounded by in my interdisciplinary setting colored the analysis and the tone of my ethnographic text.

We Are Beast

While it is certainly more common in digital anthropology today to side-line rhetorics of novelty, exotic digital practices, and fantastical democratic possibilities that open up new avenues for revolution, carrying out anthropological research in interdisciplinary and technocentric fields of research demands a more considered approach to an ethnography of the digital. At SVT Teckenspråk, everyday work was the production of digital television using digital tools, and communicating was often mediated by digital technologies such as video meeting technologies. I, the researcher, documented, analyzed and wrote about the everyday communication that took place as a part of television production in Swedish Sign Language using digital tools, and was as engulfed by digital technologies as the fellow researchers who studied, designed and developed in the offices and labs right next to my own. There was no end to the digital, and no moment in which it was absent. It was simply there, entangled with people and their everyday lives.

Rather than a new frontier or object of study, the so-called digital has become a companion to the non-digital in the sense that Haraway means when she talks about companion species (2010). The digitally driven cultural revolution seems to have been exaggerated, and we have instead undergone a kind of “symbiogenesis” of the digital and the human (Haraway 2010, p. 15ff). The digital and the human are bonded in “significant otherness”, and to focus on one as a driver of change and use it to explain the other is to miss their critical entanglements and to not take these posthuman relationships seriously enough. This intertwining of technology and the human is well-acknowledged by researchers in STS, techno-anthropology and certain strands of the digital humanities, and yet the continued use of the term ‘digital’ begs the apparently unanswerable questions: If technology is now mundane and its centrality to our ethnographies becomes an analytical artifice or, at worst, a strategy to secure funding, are we still digital anthropologists? Is there still meaning in this moniker? Or is it so that, not only have we never been modern (Latour 1993), but we have never been digital either?

Dr Rebekah Cupitt is an academic precariate currently navigating post-phd life and researching deaf culture, technology and deaf visuality on the sly. She has a doctorate in mediated communication from KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden, and her research generally takes a critical and anti-normative approach to the socio-technical, questions the empowering capabilities and other design fictions that underlie human technologies.

Crystal Abidin

Dr Crystal Abidin is a socio-cultural anthropologist of vernacular internet cultures, particularly young people’s relationships with internet celebrity, self-curation, and vulnerability. She is Postdoctoral Fellow with the Media Management and Transformation Centre (MMTC) at Jönköping University, and Adjunct Researcher with the Centre for Culture and Technology (CCAT) at Curtin University. Crystal’s forthcoming book, Internet Celebrity: Understanding Fame Online (Emerald Publishing, 2018) critically analyzes the contemporary histories and impacts of internet-native celebrity today. Reach her at wishcrys.com or @wishcrys.

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