Daniel Miller

Nell Haynes

Elisabetta Costa

Tom McDonald

Shriram Venkatraman

Razvan Nicolescu

Jolynna Sinanan

Juliano Spyer

Xinyuan Wang

How the World Changed Social Media is the first book in Why We Post, a book series that investigates the findings of anthropologists who each spent 15 months living in communities across the world. This book offers a comparative analysis summarising the results of the research and explores the impact of social media on politics and gender, education and commerce. What is the result of the increased emphasis on visual communication? Are we becoming more individual or more social? Why is public social media so conservative? Why does equality online fail to shift inequality offline? How did memes become the moral police of the internet? Supported by an introduction to the project’s academic framework and theoretical terms that help to account for the findings, the book argues that the only way to appreciate and understand something as intimate and ubiquitous as social media is to be immersed in the lives of the people who post. Only then can we discover how people all around the world have already transformed social media in such unexpected ways and assess the consequences

How the World Changed Social Media

Understanding China through Digital Anthropology questions our understanding of digital technologies by demonstrating fundamental differences in the meaning of both technology and the digital between China and the West. This follows from a longstanding historical divergence in the meaning of and attitude to the relationship between technology and humanity. The book also challenges our understanding of China through a series of case studies that range from the creation of algorithms, the normative basis of social media and the impact of digital communication on diverse fields including economic practices, gender, media and healthcare. These further demonstrate the value of long-term ethnographic studies that situate people’s online activities in their everyday offline lives. These case studies are testimony to the continued heterogeneity of China in covering sophisticated urban IT professionals, Tibetan villagers and grassroots women struggling to make a living. All of this contributes to a new understanding of a contemporary China that has been transformed by the sheer scale and dynamism manifested in the deployment of digital technologies. The book also includes an extensive summary of work undertaken by scholars inside China on digital anthropology and previously only available in Chinese.

Understanding China through Digital Anthropology

Charlotte Hawkins

Shireen Walton

Pauline Garvey

Laura Haapio-Kirk

Marília Duque

Maya de Vries

Patrick Awondo

Laila Abed Rabho

الهاتف الذكي هو حرفيًا أمام أنفنا باستمرار، وهو الأمر الذي يجعلك تعتفد اننا نعرف ما هو. لكن هل نحن نعرفه فعلاً؟ للإجابة على ذلك، قام 11 من علماء الأنثروبولوجيا بقضاء 16 شهرًا في مجتمعات في إفريقيا وآسيا وأوروبا وأمريكا الجنوبية، مع التركيز على استخدام كبار السن للهواتف الذكية. وقد أسفر ناتج بحثهم عن أن الهواتف الذكية هي تقنية للجميع ، وليس فقط من أجل الشباب. يقدم الهاتف الذكي العالمي سلسلة من وجهات النظر الأصلية المشتقة من هذا المشروع البحثي العالمي والمقارن. الهواتف الذكية أصبحت مكانًا نعيش فيه بقدر ما هو جهاز نستخدمه لتوفير "الانتهازية الدائمة" ، وذلك نظراً لوجودهم الدائم معنا. يوضح المؤلفون كيف يتخطى الهاتف الذكي كونه أكثر من مجرد "جهاز تطبيقي"، ويقوموا باستكشاف الاختلافات بين ما يقوله الناس عن الهواتف الذكية وكيفية استخدامهم لها. الهاتف الذكي هو غير مسبوق من حيث الدرجة التي يمكننا القيام بتحويلات له. ونتيجة لذلك ، فإنه يستوعب القيم الشخصية بشكل سريع. من أجل فهم الهاتف الذكي ، يجب أن نأخذ في الاعتبار مجموعة من الفروق الوطنية والثقافية ، مثل الاتصال المرئي في الصين واليابان ، الأموال المتنقلة في الكاميرون و أوغندا ، والوصول إلى المعلومات الصحية في تشيلي وأيرلندا – كل ذلك جنبًا إلى جنب مسارات متنوعة للشيخوخة في القدس والبرازيل وإيطاليا، وعندها فقط نستطيع معرفة ماهية الهاتف الذكي وفهم عواقبه على حياة الناس حول العالم.

ما وراء تكنولوجيا الشباب An Arabic Translation of the Global Smartphone

الهاتف الذكي العالمي

Life outside the mobile phone is unbearable.’ Lily, 19, factory worker. Described as the biggest migration in human history, an estimated 250 million Chinese people have left their villages in recent decades to live and work in urban areas. Xinyuan Wang spent 15 months living among a community of these migrants in a small factory town in southeast China to track their use of social media. It was here she witnessed a second migration taking place: a movement from offline to online. As Wang argues, this is not simply a convenient analogy but represents the convergence of two phenomena as profound and consequential as each other, where the online world now provides a home for the migrant workers who feel otherwise ‘homeless’. Wang’s fascinating study explores the full range of preconceptions commonly held about Chinese people – their relationship with education, with family, with politics, with ‘home’ – and argues why, for this vast population, it is time to reassess what we think we know about contemporary China and the evolving role of social media.

Social Media in Industrial China

दुनिया ने जैसे सामाजिक मीडिया को बदल दिया, हम क्यों पोस्ट करते हैं ग्रन्थ श्रृंखला का पहला ग्रन्थ है जो उन नौ मानवविज्ञानियों के निष्कर्षों पर जाँच करता है जिन्होंने दुनिया भर के समूहों में १५ महीने तक बिताया जिसमे शामिल है ब्राज़ील, चिली, चीन, इंग्लैंड, भारत, इटली, ट्रिनिडाड और टर्की. यह ग्रन्थ एक तुलनात्मक विश्लेषण को प्रदान करता है जो अनुसंधान के परिणाम को संक्षेप में प्रस्तुत करता है और राजनीति और लिंग, शिक्षा और व्यापार पर सामाजिक मीडिया के प्रभाव का पता लगाता है. दृश्य संचार पर बढ़ते हुए ज़ोर का परिणाम क्या है? क्या हम अधिक व्यक्तिगत या सामाजिक बनते हैं? क्यों सार्वजनिक सामाजिक मीडिया अधिक रूढ़िवादी होता है? क्यों ऑनलाइन समानता ऑफलाइन असमानता को बदलने में असफल होता है? कैसे मिमी इंटरनेट के नैतिक पुलिस बन गए? परियोजना के शैक्षिक ढाँचा और सैद्धांतिक शर्तों, जो निष्कर्षों के उत्तरदायी होने में मदद करते हैं, के परिचय से समर्थित होकर यह ग्रन्थ तर्क करता है कि सामाजिक मीडिया जैसे अन्तरंग और सर्वव्यापक वास्तु को समझने और मूल्यांकन करने का एक ही रास्ता पोस्ट करनेवाले लोगों के जीवन में तल्लीन होकर रहना है. तभी हम पता लगा सकते हैं कि दुनिया भर के लोगों ने जैसे सामाजिक मीडिया को अभी तक अप्रत्याशित तरीकों से बदल दिया हैं और उनके परिणाम पर आकलन कर सकते हैं.

A Hindi Translation of How the World Changed Social Media

दुनिया ने जैसे सामाजिक मीडिया को बदल दिया

 Daniel Miller

Come il mondo ha cambiato i social media è il volume complessivo di comparazione dei risultati di un’ampia indagine etnografica, coordinata da Daniel Miller, dall’eloquente titolo “Why We Post”. Nove ricercatori, incluso Miller, hanno trascorso 15 mesi sul campo, in diversi paesi del mondo (Italia del sud, Turchia sudorientale, due siti in Cina, area rurale e area industriale, Trinidad, Inghilterra, India del sud, Cile settentrionale e Brasile) a osservare e studiare, con un approccio etnografico, i modi in cui le persone usano i social media. È un fatto indiscutibile che i social sono entrati nella nostra vita con prepotenza, in modo capillare, per certi aspetti invasivo. Con un linguaggio fluido, talvolta anche colloquiale, il lettore è condotto all’interno di un ambito che gli sembra di conoscere, se non altro perché ne siamo tutti, più o meno, utenti, scoprendo però quanto di valori, di comportamenti culturalmente codificati, di ‘polizia morale’ ci sia dentro i social media. L’approccio qui presentato parte infatti da un’idea un po’ diversa rispetto a quelle più diffuse, e avvalorata nel corso della ricerca: se è indubbio che i social media hanno cambiato il mondo, la questione più interessante riguarda però il modo in cui il mondo li ha cambiati.

Come il mondo ha cambiato i social media

Laila Abed Rabho 

Daniel Miller 

Patrick Awondo 

 Maya de Vries

 Laura Haapio-Kirk

Alfonso Otaegui 

The smartphone is often literally right in front of our nose, so you would think we would know what it is. But do we? To find out, 11 anthropologists each spent 16 months living in communities in Africa, Asia, Europe and South America, focusing on the take up of smartphones by older people. Their research reveals that smartphones are technology for everyone, not just for the young. The Global Smartphone presents a series of original perspectives deriving from this global and comparative research project. Smartphones have become as much a place within which we live as a device we use to provide ‘perpetual opportunism’, as they are always with us. The authors show how the smartphone is more than an ‘app device’ and explore differences between what people say about smartphones and how they use them. The smartphone is unprecedented in the degree to which we can transform it. As a result, it quickly assimilates personal values. In order to comprehend it, we must take into consideration a range of national and cultural nuances, such as visual communication in China and Japan, mobile money in Cameroon and Uganda, and access to health information in Chile and Ireland – all alongside diverse trajectories of ageing in Al Quds, Brazil and Italy. Only then can we know what a smartphone is and understand its consequences for people’s lives around the world.

Beyond a youth technology

The Global Smartphone

Xinyuan Wang

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