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.