Caseorganic: Created page with "===Definition=== Digital anthropology is the anthropological study of the relationship between humans and digital technology — the ethnographic study of how people actually live with, through and around digital media, and of what that reveals about culture generally. ===Founding Position=== The field's programmatic statement is the introduction to ''Digital Anthropology'' (Berg, 2012), edited by Heather Horst and Daniel Miller.Horst, Heather A., and Daniel Mi..."

2026-08-25T17:12:26Z

Created page with "===Definition=== Digital anthropology is the anthropological study of the relationship between humans and digital technology — the ethnographic study of how people actually live with, through and around digital media, and of what that reveals about culture generally. ===Founding Position=== The field's programmatic statement is the introduction to ''Digital Anthropology'' (Berg, 2012), edited by Heather Horst and Daniel Miller.<ref>Horst, Heather A., and Daniel Mi..."

New page

===Definition===
Digital anthropology is the anthropological study of the relationship between humans and digital technology — the ethnographic study of how people actually live with, through and around digital media, and of what that reveals about culture generally.

===Founding Position===
The field's programmatic statement is the introduction to ''Digital Anthropology'' (Berg, 2012), edited by [[Heather Horst]] and Daniel Miller.<ref>Horst, Heather A., and Daniel Miller, eds. ''Digital Anthropology''. London: Berg, 2012. The introduction is "The Digital and the Human."</ref> Its central move is a refusal.

Horst and Miller reject the premise that the digital is less authentic, less real or less human than what preceded it. Their argument is that there is no unmediated human baseline against which the digital could count as a fall: culture is already a technology, all human life is already mediated by frames, conventions and material forms, and being human has always meant being constituted through things. On this account the digital does not make people less real; it makes visible how thoroughly they were always constructed.

The corollary is a methodological one. If the digital is not a separate domain, then studying "online life" as though it were sealed off from the rest of life is a mistake — and so is the reverse assumption that online behaviour is merely a thin reflection of offline reality.

===Principles===
The introduction sets out six, of which the working ones are:

* '''The digital intensifies the dialectic of culture.''' It does not create the process by which people are made by their own creations; it accelerates and exposes it.
* '''Holism.''' Anthropology's commitment to studying people in the round applies here: a phone cannot be understood apart from the household, economy and religion it sits inside.
* '''Cultural relativism.''' The digital is not one thing. What a smartphone means in Kingston is not what it means in London — see Horst and Miller's own work on '''link-up''' in Jamaica.
* '''The ambivalence of openness.''' Networked technology both opens and closes; claims for either alone are ideology rather than finding.
* '''Materiality.''' The digital is not immaterial. It runs on devices, cables, minerals, data centres and labour, and anthropology of the digital that ignores this is incomplete.

===Method===
Ethnography remains the core method, adapted rather than replaced: long-term participation, attention to what people do rather than what they say they do, and a preference for the specific over the aggregate. Practitioners have developed variants — multi-sited ethnography following a practice across platforms and places, and digital ethnography conducted partly within the systems studied — while remaining wary of treating trace data as a substitute for observation, since a platform's logs record what the platform chose to measure.

===Key Works and Figures===
Beyond Horst and Miller, the field's landmark studies include Tom Boellstorff's ''[[Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human|Coming of Age in Second Life]]'' (2008), the first full ethnography conducted entirely within a virtual world; danah boyd's work on American teenagers; Mizuko Ito's on Japanese mobile use and on youth media practice; Gabriella Coleman's on hackers and Anonymous; and Miller's ''Why We Post'' project, a comparative nine-country study of social media use.

===Relevance to Cyborg Anthropology===
Digital anthropology and cyborg anthropology are close relatives with different emphases. Digital anthropology asks what people do with digital media and studies it ethnographically; cyborg anthropology starts from the body and the object and asks what integration does to the category of the human. The methodological discipline runs from the first to the second: claims about "what technology does" are worth little without evidence about particular people in particular places.

===Related Reading===
* [[Heather Horst]]
* [[Russ Bernard]]
* [[Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human]]
* [[Sharon Traweek]]
* [[Traditional Anthropology]]

===References===
<references/>

[[Category:Digital Anthropology]]
[[Category:Traditional Anthropology]]

Digital Anthropology - Revision history