Digital Anthropology Reflections

For some time now, I have been asked by many what Digital Anthropology is. A valid question. One that, as I begin my masters, I realise is more complex and far reaching than can be expressed in a sentence or two. Digital Anthropology is an ongoing discussion in my eyes. Yes, it could be briefly summarised for conversational purposes, but that would only leave the listener with a few tantalising words about technology, culture and communication without revealing any significant insights. Yesterday I read an essay entitled 'Technology: The Emergence of a Hazardous Concept' by Leo Marx, which discussed the pivotal question of what technology is and how we define it. Here are some excerpts, which I think contribute to the explanation and discussion of Digital Anthropology:

"The generality of the word [technology] - its lack of speciality, the very aspect which evidently enabled it to supplant its more explicit and substantial precursors - also made it peculiarly susceptible to reification. Reification, as the philosopher George Lukacs famously explained, is what occurs when we endow a human activity with the characteristics of a thing or things. It thereby acquires, as he put it, "a 'phantom-objectivity', an autonomy that seems so strictly rational and all-embracing as to conceal every trace of its fundamental nature: the relation between people."....By consigning technologies to the realm of things, this well-established iconography distracts attention from the human - socioeconomic and political - relations which largely determine who uses them and for what purpose....We amplify the hazardous character of the concept by investing it with agency - by using the word technology as the subject of active verbs....Here we tacitly invest a machine with the power to initiate change, as if it were capable of altering the course of events, of history itself. By treating these inanimate objects - machines - as causal agents, we divert attention from the human (especially socioeconomic and political) relations responsible for precipitating this social upheaval. Contemporary discourse, private and public, is filled with hackneyed vignettes of technologically activated social change - pithy accounts of "the direction technology is taking us" or "changing our lives"....Technology, as such, makes nothing happen." (Marx, 2010, 576-577).

This is incredibly thought provoking. What a loaded statement: technology makes nothing happen! Wow. Do I agree with this statement? Maybe, maybe not, maybe half-way. But this is some of what I'll be delving into these next twelve months.

Source:

Marx, L., 2010. Technology: The Emergence of a Hazardous Concept. In: Technology and Culture 51. 561-577.