Digital Anthropology Anthropology 254 | Spring 2019

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Digital Anthropology Anthropology 254 | Spring 2019 | Course Code 60857

Tom Boellstorﬀ, Professor, Department of Anthropology Meets Tuesdays, 2:00–4:50pm, SBSG 3323 First meeting: Tuesday, April 2, 2pm, SBSG 3323

Te goal of this course is to collaboratively approach “the digital” fom an anthropological perspective. Tis will take two forms: ﬁrst, exploring ethnographic research on digital culture (fom a range of disciplines); and second, using anthropological theories and fameworks to explore the digital and the human. Tere is an emphasis on anthropological and/or ethnographically informed work. However, the readings are interdisciplinary, drawing particularly on history and communications: during the course we will link such work to digital anthropology. Tere is by now a massive body of high-quality work on these topics, classic and contemporary, and there is no way to cover all this material within the limits of ten weeks. With this in mind, the course is organized around the following themes:

WEEK 1—BEGININGS WEEKS 2 & 3—TME 1: CULTUR WEEKS 5 & 6—TME 2: SELF WEEKS 7 & 8—TME 3: INTIMACY WEEKS 9 & 10—TME 4: INTELLGENCE FINALS WEEK—FUTURS

Note that we do not meet Week 4, but do meet Finals Week.

Troughout the course, a number of topics will interweave through these themes, including class, disability, games, gender, history, method, mobility, race, sexuality, and theory. Tere are six readings each week (save Week 1). All of the readings could have been assigned to multiple themes: the chosen thematic assignment simply foregrounds aspects of the argument in question. Te readings are not divided into “required” or “recommended.” Instead, each week you will select two of the six readings to read closely and discuss in your précis (see below), depending on your own topical interests (you do not need to stick with one topical interest during the course). You are expected to skim brieﬂy through the other

four readings so as to participate in the overall class discussion. Tis will provide you with practice in diﬀerent reading styles, an invaluable scholarly skill.

Te three books will be placed on course reserves. Te remaining readings for the course are listed in the course schedule during the week they are assigned. Tese readings are accessible online, unless marked with <, in which case they will be made available as PDF ﬁles. Seminar discussions will follow three basic guidelines:

Generosity. With a ten-week course there simply is not time for substandard texts. All readings selected for the syllabus are insightful and theoretically innovative. If you ﬁnd yourself rejecting an argument in toto, this indicates your reading is insuﬃciently generous.

Proviionality. You are allowed (indeed, encouraged) to think out loud, say something and then take it back, and speak in a provisional manner, knowing that those around you will be patient, supportive, and slow to take oﬀense.

Community. Some individuals are quite comfortable speaking at length: this is desirable, but I may ask persons to wrap up their comments, or to solicit comments fom anyone.

Course Structure 1) Seven préci You will do seven (7) précis, which we will share with each other. Tis means you can choose three weeks (including Week 1) in which you do not have to do a précis. Each précis should be 2,500–3,500 characters in length. Tis is approximately 400–500 words, or 1.5–2 double-spaced pages, but you will be assessed based on character count. Each précis should take the form of questions, commentary, and analysis about at least two of the six readings for that week. You may discuss more than two readings; you will not receive full credit if you discuss only one reading. A précis can link readings for a particular week to earlier course readings, or to readings fom outside the course, but particularly the latter of these is discouraged. I discourage negative critiques; focus on generous engagement. As noted above, you should look brieﬂy at all readings for any particular week and be prepared to discuss them, even if you do not do a précis at all that week.

A précis must be uploaded onto the course’s Google Forms website before the beginning of class. You may optionally also bring one or more hard copies to class. A précis can never be turned in late. If you do not attend class, or leave class early, any précis you submit that day will not be counted. Each précis counts for 8 percent of your overall grade, so the seven précis together constitute 56% of the overall grade. Please note that falling even one précis short will thus severely impact your grade. You will receive only partial credit for a précis that does not meet the minimum requirements discussed above; if you do an additional (eighth, ninth, or tenth) précis, the grade for that additional précis can replace an earlier précis with a lower grade.

2) Te final paper You must write a course paper, which will be 44% of your overall grade. It must be emailed by the deadline as a single Word document (not pdf) to [email protected]. Due to the emphasis on reading and précis, the final paper is relatively short. It should be 4,000–5,000 words long, inclusive of title, endnotes, and references. Te paper can be on any topic that relates to the course, so long as you obtain my approval and so long as you cite and engage course texts and discussions in a significant manner. If you would like to write a paper that links up to research interests, including for your Master’s thesis, advancement to candidacy, or dissertation, that is allowed—but you must cite and engage course texts and discussions in a significant manner. You may use Chicago Style (used by the American Anthropological Association) or some other style you prefer (e.g., MLA style), so long as you are consistent. You must include full bibliographic references to course texts as they are used. You may bring in outside readings, but it is not necessary to do so and they should not overwhelm or substitute for course readings.

Te course grade will thus be calculated as follows: Seven précis times eight points per précis = 56 points Final paper = 44 points Total = 100 points

You will then be assigned a letter grade as follows: A+ 96.7–100; A 93.4–96.6; A- 90–93.3; B+ 86.7–89.9; B 83.4–86.6; B- 80–83.3; C+ 76.7–79.9; C 73.4–76.6; C- 70–73.3; D 65–69.9; F 64.9 and below.

Students with disabilities: to quote fom my colleague Karen Nakamura’s syllabus, “If you need a reasonable (or even unreasonable) accommodation, please let me know and I’ll make it happen. Tis goes triply for folks with non-visible disabilities or who pass or mask or

compensate. No need to do that here.” Te Disabilities Services Center has many resources; registering with them can help ensure appropriate arrangements in all your courses (see http://www.disability.uci.edu/).

COURSE SCHEDULE Week 1—BEGININGS

< Bateson, Gregory. 1972. “A Teory of Play and Fantasy.” In Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and Epitemology, 150–66. New York: Ballantine Books.

< Geertz, Cliﬀord. 1973. “Te Impact of the Concept of Culture on the Concept of Man.” In Te Interpretation of Culture, 33–54. New York: Basic Books.

< Pink, Sarah, Heather Horst, John Postill, Larissa Hjorth, Tania Lewis, and Jo Tacchi. 2016. “Ethnography in a Digital World.” In Digital Ethnography: Principle and Practice, 1–18. Los Angeles: Sage.

Week 2—TME 1: CULTUR {PART 1}

< Boellstorﬀ, Tom. 2015. “Te Subject and Scope of Tis Inquiry.” In Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologit Explore the Virtually Human, Second Edition, 3–31. Princeton, Princeton University Press.

Boellstorﬀ, Tom, and Braxton Soderman. 2017. “Transplatform: Culture, Context, and the Intellivision/Atari VCS Rivalry.” Game & Culture. doi:10.1177/1555412017721839.

Dalsgaard, Steﬀen. 2016. “Te Ethnographic Use of Facebook in Everyday Life.” Anthropological Forum 26 (1): 96–114. doi:10.1080/00664677.2016.1148011.

Duarte, Marisa. 2017. “Connected Activism: Indigenous Uses of Social Media for Shaping Political Change.” Autralaian Journal of Information Systems 21: 1–12. doi:10.3127/ajis.v21i0.1525.

McIntosh, Janet. 2010. “Mobile Phones and Mipoho’s Prophecy: Te Powers and Dangers of Flying Language.” American Ethnologit 37 (2): 337–53. doi:10.1111/j.1548- 1425.2010.01259.x.

Rea, Stephen C. 2018. “Calibrating Play: Sociotemporality in South Korean Digital Gaming Culture.” American Anthropologit 120 (3): 500–511. doi:10.1111/aman.13020.

Week 3—TME 1: CULTUR {PART 2}

< Boellstorﬀ, Tom, Bonnie Nardi, Celia Pearce, and T.L. Taylor. 2012. “Why Tis Handbook?” In Ethnography and Virtual Worlds: A Handbook of Method, 1–12. Princeton, Princeton University Press.

Crawford, Kate, and Tarleton Gillespie. 2016. “What Is a Flag for? Social Media Reporting Tools and the Vocabulary of Complaint.” New Media & Society 18 (3): 410–428. doi:10.1177/1461444814543163.

Irani, Lily. 2019. Chaing Innovation: Making Entrepreneurial Citizens in Modern India. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Pink, Sarah, Larissa Hjorth, and Heather Horst. 2016. “Tactile Digital Ethnography: Researching Mobile Media through the Hand.” Mobile Media & Communication 4 (2): 237–51. doi:10.1177/2050157915619958.

Postill, John. 2013. “Democracy in an Age of Viral Reality: A Media Epidemiography of Spain’s Indignados Movement.” Ethnography 15 (1): 51–69. doi:10.1177/1466138113502513.

Recollet, Karyn. 2015. “Glyphing Decolonial Love Trough Urban Flash Mobbing and Walking With Our Siters.” Curriculum Inquiry 45 (1): 129–45. doi:10.1080/03626784.2014.995060.

Week 5—TME 2: SELF {PART 1}

< Foucault, Michel. 1988. “Technologies of the Self.” In Technologie of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault, edited by Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutman, and Patrick H. Hutton, 16–49. London: Tavistock Publications.

Hijazi-Omari, Hiyam, and Rivka Ribak. 2008. “Playing with Fire: On the Domestication of the Mobile Phone among Palestinian Teenage Girls in Israel.” Information, Communication, & Society 11 (2): 149–66. doi:10.1080/13691180801934099.

< Humphreys, Lee. 2018. “Introduction.” In Te Qualiﬁed Self: Social Media and the Accounting of Everyday Life, 1–28. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Kang, Juhee, Richard Ling, and Arul Chib. 2018. “Te Flip: Mobile Communication of North Korean Migrant Women during Teir Journey to South Korea.” International Journal of Communication 12: 3533–52. http://www.unikorea.go.kr/unikorea/business/NKDefectorsPolicy/status/lately/.

Poster, Winifed. 2013. “Hidden Sides of the Credit Economy: Emotions, Outsourcing, and Indian Call Centers.” International Journal of Comparative Sociology 54 (3): 205–27.

Rimer, Jonah R. 2016. “Internet Sexual Oﬀending fom an Anthropological Perspective: Analysing Oﬀender Perceptions of Online Spaces.” Journal of Sexual Aggresion 2600 (July): 1–13. doi:10.1080/13552600.2016.1201158.

Week 6—TME 2: SELF {PART 2} Boellstorﬀ, Tom. 2019. “Te Opportunity to Contribute: Disability and the Digital Entrepreneur.” Information, Communication, & Society 22 (4): 474–90. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2018.1472796.

Gershon, Ilana. 2014. “Selling Your Self in the United States.” Political & Legal Anthropology Review 37 (2): 281–95. doi:10.1111/plar.12075.

Maddalena, Kate and Jeremy Packer. 2015. “Te Digital Body: Telegraphy as Discourse Network.” Teory, Culture & Society 32 (1): 93–117. doi:10.1177/0263276413520620.

Pink, Sarah, and Kerstin Leder Mackley. 201.3 “Saturated and Situated: Expanding the Meaning of Media in the Routines of Everyday Life.” Media, Culture, & Society 35 (6): 677–91. doi:10.1177/0163443713491298.

Stensrud, Astrid B. 2017. “Precarious Entrepreneurship: Mobile Phones, Work and Kinship in Neoliberal Peru.” Social Anthropology 25 (2): 159–73. doi:10.1111/1469- 8676.12395.

Williamson, Bess. 2012. “Electric Moms and Quad Drivers: People with Disabilities Buying, Making, and Using Technology in Postwar America.” American Studie 52 (1): 5–29. doi:10.1353/ams.2012.0030.

Week 7—TME 3: INTIMACY {PART 1} Dye, Michaelanne, David Nemer, Josiah Mangiameli, Amy S Bruckman, and Neha Kumar. 2018. “El Paquete Semanal: Te Week’s Internet in Havana.” Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’18), 1–12. doi:10.1145/3173574.3174213.

Jackson, Sarah J., Moya Bailey, and Brooke Foucault Welles. 2018. “#GirlsLikeUs: Trans Advocacy and Community Building Online.” New Media & Society 20 (5): 1868–88. doi:10.1177/1461444817709276.

Juris, Jefey S. 2012. “Reﬂections on #Occupy Everywhere: Social Media, Public Space, and Emerging Logics of Aggregation.” American Ethnologit 39 (2): 259–79. doi:10.1111/j.1548-1425.2012.01362.x.

Mcdonald, Tom. 2018. “Strangership and Social Media: Moral Imaginaries of Gendered Strangers in Rural China.” American Anthropologit 0 (0): 1–13. doi:10.1111/aman.13152.

Taylor, T. L. 2018. Watch Me Play: Twitch and the Rie of Game Live Streaming. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Villa-Nicholas, Melissa. 2018. “Terror by Telephone: Normative Anxieties Around Obscene Calls in the 1960s.” First Monday 22 (5–7). http://dx.doi.org/10.5210/fm.v23i5.7010.

Week 8—TME 3: INTIMACY {PART 2} Abidin, Crystal. 2016. “Visibility Labour: Engaging with Inﬂuencers’ Fashion Brands and #OOTD Advertorial Campaigns on Instagram.” Media International Autralia 161 (1): 86–100. doi:10.1177/1329878X16665177.

Brubaker, Jed R., Mike Ananny, and Kate Crawford. 2016. “Departing Glances: A Sociotechnical Account of ‘Leaving’ Grindr.” New Media and Society 18 (3): 373–90. doi:10.1177/1461444814542311.

Duf, Brooke Erin. 2016. “Te Romance of Work: Gender and Aspirational Labour in the Digital Culture Industries.” International Journal of Cultural Studie 19 (4): 441–57. doi:10.1177/1367877915572186.

Gray, Kishonna L. 2018. “Gaming Out Online: Black Lesbian Identity Development and Community Building in Xbox Live.” Journal of Lebian Studie 22 (3). Taylor & Francis: 282–96. doi:10.1080/10894160.2018.1384293.

Higgin, Tanner. 2008. “Blackless Fantasy: Te Disappearance of Race in Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games.” Game & Culture 4 (1): 3–26. doi:10.1177/1555412008325477.

Mrázek, Rudolf. 1997. “‘Let Us Become Radio Mechanics’: Technology and National Identity in Late-Colonial Netherlands East Indies.” Comparative Studie in Society & Hitory 39 (1): 3–33.

Week 9—TME 4: INTELLGENCE {PART 1} Hadlaw, Jan. 2011. “Saving Time and Annihilating Space: Discourses of Speed in AT&T Advertising, 1909–1929.” Space & Culture 14 (1): 85–113. doi:10.1177/1206331210389273.

< Jones, Matthew L. 2017. Reckoning with Matter: Calculating Machine, Innovation, and Tinking about Tinking fom Pacal to Babbage. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. (Introduction, Chapter 1, Chapter 6, Epilogue)

Lewis, Jason Edward, Noelani Arista, Archer Pechawis, and Suzanne Kite. 2018. “Making Kin with the Machines.” Journal of Deign & Science. https://doi.org/10.21428/bfafd97b

Nakamura, Lisa. 2014. “Indigenous Circuits: Navajo Women and the Racialization of Early Electronic Manufacture.” American Quarterly 66 (4): 919–41.

Omari, Jefey. 2018. “Digital Access amongst the Marginalized : Democracy and Internet Governance in Rio de Janeiro.” Political and Legal Anthropology Review 41 (2): 277– 89. doi:10.1111/plar.12264.

Seaver, Nick. 2017. “Algorithms as Culture: Some Tactics for the Ethnography of Algorithmic Systems.” Big Data & Society 4 (2): 1–12. doi:10.1177/2053951717738104.

Week 10—TME 4: INTELLGENCE {PART 2} Galison, Peter. 1994. “Te Ontology of the Enemy: Norbert Wiener and the Cybernetic Vision.” Critical Inquiry 21 (1): 228–66. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1343893.

Haring, Kristen. 2003. “Te ‘Freer Men’ of Ham Radio: How a Technical Hobby Provided Social and Spatial Distance.” Technology & Culture 44 (4): 734–61. doi:10.1353/tech.2003.0164.

Robertson, Jennifer. 2017. Robo Sapiens Japanicu: Robots, Gender, Family, and the Japanee Nation. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Rosenblat, Alex, and Luke Stark. 2016. “Algorithmic Labor and Information Asymmetries : A Case Study of Uber’s Drivers.” International Journal of Communication 10: 3758– 84. doi:https://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/view/4892/1739.

Turner, Fred. 2005. “Where the Counterculture Met the New Economy: Te WELL and the Origins of Virtual Community.” Technology & Culture 46 (3): 485–512. doi:10.1353/tech.2005.0154.

Wilf, Eitan. 2013. “Sociable Robots, Jazz Music, and Divination: Contingency as a Cultural Resource for Negotiating Problems of Intentionality.” American Ethnologit 40 (4): 605–18. doi:10.1111/amet.12041.

Finals Week—FUTURS

< Boellstorﬀ, Tom. 2019. “Rethinking Digital Anthropology,” Second Edition. In Digital Anthropology, Second Edition. Hannah Knox and Haidy Geismar, editors. London: Bloomsbury Publishing.

de Abreu, Maria José A. 2013. “Technological Indeterminacy: Medium, Treat, Temporality.” Anthropological Teory 13 (3): 267–84. doi:10.1177/1463499613492093.

Dokumaci, Arseli. 2018. “Disability as Method: Interventions in the Habitus of Ableism through Media-Creation.” Diability Studie Quarterly 38 (3). doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.18061/dsq.v38i3.6491.

Geiger, R. Stuart. 2016. “Bot-based Collective Blocklists in Twitter: Te Counterpublic Moderation of Harassment in a Networked Public Space.” Information, Communication, & Society 19 (6): 787–803. doi:10.1080/1369118X.2016.1153700.

Shapiro, Seth, and Lee Humphreys. 2012. “Exploring Old and New Media: Comparing Military Blogs to Civil War Letters.” New Media & Society 15 (7): 1151–67. doi:10.1177/1461444812466718.

Wong-Villacres, Marisol, Arkadeep Kumar, Aditya Vishwanath, Naveena Karusala, Betsy Disalvo, and Neha Kumar. 2018. “Designing for Intersections.” DIS ’18 Proceedings of the 2018 Deigning Interactive Systems Conference, 45–58. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/3196709.3196794.

Final paper due Tuesday, June 18, 5:00pm, emailed to [email protected].