Cualquiera

Ethnographic Approaches to Digital Media
Annual Review of Anthropology
Vol. 39: 487-505 (Volume publication date October 2010)
First published online as a Review in Advance on June 21, 2010
DOI: 10.1146/annurev.anthro.012809.104945
E. Gabriella Coleman
Department of Media, Culture, and Communication, New York University, New York, NY 10003; email: biella@nyu.edu

ABSTRACT
This reviewsurveys and divides the ethnographic corpus on digital media into three broad but overlapping categories: the cultural politics of digital media, the vernacular cultures of digital media, and the prosaics of digital media. Engaging these three categories of scholarship on digital media, I consider how ethnographers are exploring the complex relationships between the local practices and globalimplications of digital media, their materiality and politics, and their banal, as well as profound, presence in cultural life and modes of communication. I consider the way these media have become central to the articulation of cherished beliefs, ritual practices, and modes of being in the world; the fact that digital media culturally matters is undeniable but showing how, where, and why it matters isnecessary to push against peculiarly narrow presumptions about the universality of digital experience.
No mode of production and therefore no dominant social order and therefore no dominant culture in reality includes or exhausts all of human practice, human energy or human intention.
Raymond Williams
INTRODUCTION
Whenever and wherever individuals and groups deploy and communicate with digitalmedia, there will be circulations, reimaginings, magnifications, deletions, translations, revisionings, and remakings of a range of cultural representations, experiences, and identities, but the precise ways that these dynamics unfold can never be fully anticipated in advance. In some instances, digital media have extended their reach into the mundane heart of everyday life, most visibly with cellphones—gadgets now vital to conduct business affairs in remote areas of the world, as well as in bustling global cities. In other instances, digital artifacts have helped engender new collectivities: Web-cam girls, gamers, hackers, and others, whose senses of self, vocation, and group sociabilities are shaped significantly, although not exclusively nor deterministically, by digital technologies.1The diversity and pervasiveness of digital media can make them difficult to study, but also can make them compelling objects of ethnographic inquiry. Still, anthropologists have been slow to enter this terrain—at least until recently, when the trickle of 1990s publications became a steady stream. Here I survey and divide this growing ethnographic corpus on digital media into three broad butoverlapping categories. The first category explores the relationship between digital media and what might be called the cultural politics of media. This work examines how cultural identities, representations, and imaginaries, such as those hinged to youth, diaspora, nation, and indigeneity, are remade, subverted, communicated, and circulated through individual and collective engagement with digitaltechnologies. The second category explores the vernacular cultures of digital media, evinced by discrepant phenomena, digital genres, and groups—hackers, blogging, Internet memes, and migrant programmers—whose logic is organized significantly around, although not necessarily determined by, selected properties of digital media. The final category, what I call prosaics of digital media, examines howdigital media feed into, reflect, and shape other kinds of social practices, like economic exchange, financial markets, and religious worship. Attention to these rituals, broad contexts, and the material infrastructures and social protocols that enable them illuminates how the use and production of digital media have become integrated into everyday cultural, linguistic, and economic life.2
The...