Digital Environments
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Urte Undine Frömming, Steffen Köhn, Samantha Fox, Mike Terry (eds.) Digital Environments Media Studies Urte Undine Frömming, Steffen Köhn, Samantha Fox, Mike Terry (eds.) Digital Environments Ethnographic Perspectives across Global Online and Offline Spaces The printed version of this book is available thanks to the support of Freie Uni- versität Berlin, Department of Political and Social Sciences, Reserach Area Visual and Media Anthropology. An electronic version of this book is freely available, thanks to the support of libraries working with Knowledge Unlatched. KU is a collaborative ini- tiative designed to make high quality books Open Access for the public good. The Open Access ISBN for this book is 978-3-8394-3497-0 This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 (BY-NC-ND). which means that the text may be used for non-commercial purposes, provided credit is given to the author. For details go to http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/. Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Natio- nalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or uti- lized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any infor- mation storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. © 2017 transcript Verlag, Bielefeld Cover layout: Mike Terry Typeset by Francisco Bragança, Bielefeld Printed in Germany Print-ISBN 978-3-8376-3497-6 PDF-ISBN 978-3-8394-3497-0 Content Foreword | 9 Sarah Pink Digital Environments and the Future of Ethnography An Introduction | 13 Urte Undine Frömming, Steffen Köhn, Samantha Fox, Mike Terry PART 1 DIGITAL COMMUNITIES AND THE RE-CREATION OF THE SELF AND SOCIAL RELATIONSHIPS ONLINE A Comment on East Greenland Online Media Commenting Systems as Spaces for Public Debate with a Focus on East Greenland in the Greenlandic Media | 25 Jóhanna Björk Sveinbjörnsdóttir Welcome Home An Ethnography on the Experiences of Airbnb Hosts in Commodifying Their Homes | 39 Brigitte Borm How has the Internet Determined the Identity of Chilean Gay Men in the Last Twenty Years? | 53 Juan Francisco Riumalló Grüzmacher Red Packets in the Real and Virtual Worlds How Multi-Function WeChat Influences Chinese Virtual Relationships | 67 Xiaojing Ji Antifeminism Online MGTOW (Men Going Their Own Way) | 77 Jie Liang Lin Exploring the Potentials and Challenges of Virtual Distribution of Contemporary Art | 97 Jonas Blume Blind and Online An Ethnographic Perspective on Everyday Participation Within Blind and Visually Impaired Online Communities | 117 Olivier Llouquet How Has Social Media Changed the Way We Grieve? | 127 Ellen Lapper Watch Me, I’m Live Periscope and the “New-Individualistic” Need for Attention | 143 Dario Bosio PART 2 POLITICAL DIGITAL ENVIRONMENTS AND ACTIVISM ONLINE Hair, Blood and the Nipple Instagram Censorship and the Female Body | 159 Gretchen Faust Berlin. Wie bitte? An Exploration of the Construction of Online Platforms for the Mutual Support of Young Spanish Immigrants in Berlin | 171 Teresa Tiburcio Jiménez An Exploration of the Role of Twitter in the Discourse Around Race in South Africa Using the #Feesmustfall Movement as a Pivot for Discussion | 195 Suzanne Beukes Migration, Political Art and Digitalization | 211 Sara Wiederkehr Gonzáles “You’re Not Left Thinking That You’re The Only Gay in the Village” The Role of the Facebook Group Seksualiti Merdeka in the Malaysian LGBT Community | 227 Veera Helena Pitkänen Finding a Visual Voice The #Euromaidan Impact on Ukrainian Instagram Users | 239 Karly Domb Sadof Google A Religion Expanding Notions of Religion Online | 251 Joanna Sleigh Notes on Contributors | 263 Foreword Sarah Pink The title of this book—Digital Environments—signifies a significant step in the ways we experience and conceptualize the everyday worlds that we live and research in. That is, both anthropologists and the people who collaborate with us in our projects, inhabit and co-constitute environments in which digital technologies and media are inextricably entangled. This is continually evidenced by our everyday experience as researchers, as the people we meet in the course of our projects move through worlds that are at once on-line and off-line, and as we ourselves undertake research in ways that are never separated from the digital or material elements of life. As argued in two recent publications, the way that we understand our ethnographic practice needs to account for this (Pink, Horst et al 2016), and we also need new theoretical tools with which to understand the “digital materiality” of our environments, and ongoing changing processes and things through which they are configured (Pink, Ardevol and Lanzeni 2016). As this book of essays shows, this digital material world is infinitely extensive and continually unfolding in new ways. It can be encountered across many places and is integral to many research themes and questions. In fact, there may not be anywhere that it does not impinge, given that in a world where the digital has come to dominate, to be non digital is itself a state or status that is determined, relationally, to the digital. Digital Environments is moreover published in an academic context where digital anthropology and ethnography are flourishing. Its chapters therefore capture an intellectual moment where we are beginning to make sense of the digital elements of the environments we share with research collaborators; not so much as an object of study in themselves, but as something that anthropologists and ethnographers of other disciplines need to account for when exploring other topics—including fields such as art, wellbeing and activism. In this case we might ask: what is special about this “turn” in anthropological practice and attention? The answer is not that we simply have a new research subject or a new theoretical perspective that we might apply old forms of enquiry to, but rather that digital technologies and media bring 10 Sarah Pink with them a body of theoretical, methodological and practical implications. Many of the themes and issues they raise are in fact already part of the sub- disciplines of visual and media anthropology. It is therefore, in this sense, not at all surprising that such an interesting collection of essays should emerge from the Visual and Media Anthropology program at Freie Universität Berlin. Media anthropology scholars have been ready for this moment for a long time. Moreover, recent works in media anthropology demonstrate a strongly developed field of theoretical and empirical media research (cf. Postill and Bräuchler 2010). Likewise, visual anthropologists were amongst the first to explore the possibilities of the internet for unconventional ways to disseminate their work. These sub-disciplines of anthropology and their fields of theory and practice therefore offer an important starting point for the study of digital environments. This is, moreover, a different starting point from others which have emerged, for instance, in ways situated more closely theoretically to material culture studies (Horst and Miller 2012) or that put participant observation at the center of the ethnographic research (cf. Boellstorf et al 2012). Instead, an approach to digital environments that is more closely harnessed to media and visual anthropology, and that is also informed by a training in visual anthropology practice, has something different to offer anthropology which will inevitably be itself performed in a digital material environment. It invites us to engage with visual and sensory research techniques as part of digital ethnography practice, to use these technologies in ways that are experimental— while at the same time theoretically coherent—and attentive to seeking ways in which to get beyond the surface that is often only scratched at by standard qualitative interviewing methods. An approach rooted in visual anthropology invites us to engage with the potential of audio-visual media for enabling empathetic understandings, as well as a tradition of reflexive and collaborative ways of working with participants in research, which can be translated with digital technologies into new forms of collaboration online. Digital Environments therefore is a book that has emerged from a new generation of anthropologists. What is exciting about it is that it also represents the work of new scholars whose practice focuses on a central issue for the discipline, but does so through the prism of visual and media anthropology, which has traditionally not been part of the concern of mainstream scholarship in anthropology. This, I believe is a good sign. It implies an exciting future for the discipline as these perspectives and projects develop in the next years. Foreword 11 REFERENCES Boellstorff, Tom/Nardi, Bonni/Pearce, Celia /Taylor, T.L. (eds.) (2012): Ethno- graphy and Virtual Worlds: A Handbook of Method, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Bräuchler, Birgit/Postill, John (eds.)(2010): Theorising Media and Practice, Oxford: Berghahn. Horst, Heather./Miller, Daniel (eds.)(2012): Digital Anthropology, London: Bloomsbury. Pink, Sarah/Horst, Heather/Postill, John/Hjorth, Larissa /Lewis, Tania/Tacchi, Jo (eds.) (2016): Digital Ethnography: Principles and Practice, London: Sage. Pink,